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In December 2021, the government published a white paper called People at the Heart of Care. It outlined a 10-year vision to put personalised care and support at the heart of adult social care. This built upon previous policy and legislation, including the Care Act 2014.
One important part of the report required us to promote market sustainability. You can read more about this in Section 5 of the Care Act.
The new policy on market sustainability requires us to do two things. We must create, publish and deliver a plan to improve the sustainability of the market. We must also work with social care providers to develop an analysis of the cost of delivering care services, and use this to base our decisions about what we pay for care. We are provided with some grant funding to help improve the rates that are paid for care.
We had already started a piece of work to understand the costs involved in local care delivery, when the government published ‘People at the Heart of Care’. The government requires us to do this work for homecare (for all adults) and for residential care (for older people). We have also included some other types of care, including supported living services.
The information is now used to support our work on setting fees.
These reports summarise our findings:
- Dorset Cost of Care Homecare Summary April 2022
- Residential Nursing - Cost of Care Report - Exec Summary
If you would like to request these documents in an alternative format – please contact talktoadultsteam@dorsetcouncil.gov.uk
These documents have been shared with local providers through the Provider Forums. They were also part of a report to Cabinet which approved our provisional market sustainability plan.
We did not have high numbers of providers send us their data, especially for homecare. We have tried a number of times to improve the amount of responses we got, by extending timeframes and by offering one to one sessions to support template completion.
Because of the low responses, as part of our plans we have committed to re-run the exercise in early 2023 to 2024. We will replace these documents with the new ones once that work is complete.
On the back of these analyses and based on many other discussions with local providers and those who draw on support, we constructed a plan to improve the sustainability of our local market. is integral to our forthcoming Commissioning Strategies.
Our Market Sustainability plan will improve the sustainability of our local market and will be vital to the success of our future commissioning strategies.
Market Sustainability Plan for Dorset, 2023-2025