Care & Support Needs Assessment – On Demand Support Centre
A call centre equipped with ‘on demand’ care needs assessors who will complete care needs assessments and annual reviews, providing shared resource efficiencies to local authorities.
THE PROPOSAL
An on-demand call centre pilot offering local authorities extended assessor capacity to process Care and Support assessments and annual reviews. The call centre will be equipped with telephone or video calling software and staffed with appropriately qualified individuals with care assessment experience, using Looking Local’s* BetterCare Support product to underpin the conversation for consistent strength-based suggestions.
The service would reduce the need for individuals to visit their council or for practitioners to make home visits, providing an efficient way to deliver care and support assessments, driving value for money and offering local authorities a cost-effective way to reduce backlogs.
Initial modelling by Reed in Partnership was based on a call centre team employing qualified Care Needs Assessors and a Social Worker Manager, who can carry out up to 3,900 assessments, across a 12 month contract period. However, the model was designed to be flexible to meet – as far as possible – individual council and service user need. An alternate, more person-centred approach was to conduct fewer assessments to allow time for the assessors to engage with the service user’s care support network. This would allow care needs to be pre-validated ahead of completing the assessment itself, helping to avoid all re-assessments being conducted on a face-to-face basis, again freeing up limited council resources.
With between three and five councils investing in the pilot, this equated to up to 780 assessments per council, a potential saving of between £282,740 – £428,600 per council based on typical assessment and re-assessment costs. Further economies of scale could be achieved if demand enabled the pilot to be scaled up. The approach was scalable based on local authority demand, with a larger team offering cost benefits to initial investors in the pilot.
The aim was to prove that assessments and reviews could be safely and effectively outsourced, and this pilot project tracked the benefits and business case for doing so. We worked closely with council teams to ensure the outsourced model dovetailed with current processes, and throughout the project, appropriate consideration was given to safeguarding, risk and fraud to deliver assessments on which the council relied.
*Looking Local is now part of Infoshare+, a UK data and software company – more information can be found here
HEADLINE BUSINESS CASE
The Government’s announcement to postpone the charging reforms simplified the short-term picture in the adult social care (ASC) space. However, staff recruitment and retention challenges remained underfunded and unresolved, despite the increased funding the sector received over the financial year. The backlog of Care & Support Assessments continued to rise. Nearly half a million people were waiting for an assessment, care and support, direct payments to begin, or for a review of their care needs.
Local Authorities were struggling to keep up with the current demand and vulnerable people were at risk of deteriorating further as waiting times continued to increase.
A key driver of this project was that Looking Local* – working with a number of councils collaborating on a digital approach to Care & Support Assessments (BetterCare Support) – established that the typical cost of carrying out face-to-face care and support assessment was £620 per assessment and £433 per review. This project aimed to greatly reduce this individual cost, speed up the time taken and support councils with their backlogs, without compromising assessment quality.
*Looking Local is now part of Infoshare+, a UK data and software company – more information can be found here
PROJECT DESCRIPTION
The project offered investing councils the opportunity to co-design a robust process and outsource c780 assessments from their current backlog of new assessments and annual reviews.
The project ran across three distinct phases:
PHASE ONE– DISCOVERY (6 – 8 WEEKS)
- Workshop to outline approach
- Introduce BetterCare Support
- Co-design of agreed pathways for the ‘on-demand’ service
- Map the processes to integrate the new service
- Define the required change management activities
- Identify appropriate systems customisation to each local authority
PHASE TWO – DESIGN (4 – 6 WEEKS)
- Deploying a version of the BetterCare Support platform for each partner for Reed staff to access
- Test and refine processes and pathways
- Process & platform sign off
PHASE THREE - DELIVERY (38 – 42 WEEKS)
- Go live
- Ongoing delivery of Care & Support Assessments/Reviews
- Monthly reviews and process refinement
Reed in Partnership built a new care assessment call centre team based alongside their existing call centre teams in Liverpool City centre. The new team had access to Reed in Partnership’s ACD (automatic call distribution) phone system, which was tailored to reflect individual council requirements identified in the Discovery Phase. This included having the option to offer video call support if appropriate.
A team of qualified or part-qualified Care Needs Assessors, the minimum number required to provide a consistent service throughout the Delivery phase, utilised BetterCare Support to inform the care needs assessments and, if deemed appropriate in the Discovery phase, captured and reported data to the individual partner councils. Assessment quality, reporting and team performance was managed by a dedicated, qualified Social Care Needs Assessment Manager.
WHY GET INVOLVED
- Added capacity to your team without the overheads
- Gaining a positive impact on your backlog
- Reducing the queries on the front door
- Getting closer to the goal – 100% Annual reviews
- Working with other like-minded, forward thinking, local authorities to co-design a unique, assessor-led service, underpinned by a bespoke, council co-designed digital solution
- Sharing the risk and costs of testing new ways of working
- Developing new models of working to support the transformation of Adult Social Care
- Reducing stress on the current assessment process and your workforce
- Improving relationships with service users
Following the pilot phase, each co-funder received a discount of between 10% and 20% on the unit cost per Care & Support Needs Assessment delivered by the resulting product – equating to a potential saving of at least £12,000, based on the proposed pilot volumes per council alone.
ORGANISATION PROFILE
Established in 1998, Reed in Partnership’s mission is to positively transform people and communities. We support individuals, their families and the places where they live to prosper, often under challenging circumstances. Through the five divisions of our business – Reed Wellbeing, Reed Citizen Services, Reed Assessment, Reed Employability and Reed Environment – we have delivered over 40 publicly-funded services, supporting over 2.4 million people per year. We pride ourselves on delivering excellent customer service, putting the needs of our service users at the heart of our service design.
Through our work in supporting Integrated Health programmes and the Healthier You National Diabetes Prevention Programme, Reed in Partnership already employs call centre teams who are fully screened and trained, and who demonstrate empathy with callers and ensure compliance with commissioner contractual requirements. The approach was enhanced through the employment of a team qualified Care Needs Assessors led by a qualified Social Worker/ Manager. The team worked as an ‘extension’ to each council’s own teams, offering a remote care and support assessment service that freed up locally based council resources whilst at the same time ensuring service quality and efficiency both through the use of BetterCare Support and through effective caseload management.
BetterCare Support was co-designed by six councils (Coventry, Dorset, Lincolnshire, Medway, Oxfordshire and Solihull) and developed by Looking Local*, to address the need for a digital approach to care and support assessments within Adult Social Care (ASC). BetterCare Support uses 40+ animations to guide a service user through a self-assessment of their care and support needs and generates a reliable, reflective assessment.
*Looking Local is now part of Infoshare+, a UK data and software company – more information can be found here
