About Planning4care
Strategic needs assessment for social care and health
Planning4care provides the intelligence that social care and health commissioners and providers need in order to improve service planning and delivery. Information and analysis from Planning4care enables local commissioners and providers to understand likely future care needs and service requirements under a range of alternative future planning scenarios.
How does Planning4care help commissioners?
Understanding the needs of populations, and likely service requirements, is a key step to effective commissioning. The World Class Commissioning competencies and Joint Strategic Needs Assessments guidance highlight the importance of establishing a full understanding of current and future local needs and requirements, predicting and anticipating the care needs of the whole population including people funding their own care.
This is where Planning4care can help you:
- robust analysis of current and future need, to inform the planning stage of the commissioning cycle
- detailed intelligence on a series of key questions and "what-if..." scenarios which all commissioners need to address as part of their joint strategic needs assessment and commissioning frameworks. This analysis is available online and in summary reports for all local authority areas
- enabling commissioners to plan both for those requiring publicly funded care and for those who are funding their own care. It also enables support needs of informal carers to be identified and costed
- providing a clear overview, powerful analysis and decision support at all strategic levels, including council elected members, directors, executive and non-executive members of PCTs, and local strategic partnerships
Combined with evidence from user consultation on the kind of support older people will be looking for in the years to come, the analysis produced by Planning4care is an essential basis for ensuring that the right provision is available to meet changing needs and aspirations in the future.
Products and services
Planning4care provides a combination of standard products and services that can be tailored to your needs, including:
- Strategic needs assessment report for your local area
- Scenario mapping: Exploration of “what-if…” scenarios
- Web-site access to the analysis tool
- Briefings on the analysis and the use of the web-based tool
- Annual updates
- Bespoke analysis, e.g. gap-analysis, “what-if…” scenarios
- Workshops and seminars to help develop longer–term commissioning strategies
Indicative costs
Planning4care for a local authority and PCT starts from £5,000, with the basic package including the strategic needs assessment report, scenario mapping, website access and introductory briefing.
How does it work?
Planning4care draws its analysis from the LEAP model - Local Evidence Adjusted Prevalence - developed by the Planning4care team. The model follows the PSSRU / Wanless national methodology in adopting a set of clearly defined levels of need for social care support, and then estimating the current and projected numbers of the total 65+ population expected to fall into each of those groups. A particular innovation is the use of local risk factors to derive estimates and projections that reflect the profiles of individual localities as closely as possible. Adjustments have also been made to take account of level of take-up of Attendance and Disability Living Allowance (AA/DLA) among people aged 65+.
The needs estimates are then linked to the types of service packages and costs that may provide different levels of support and/or meet defined outcomes, under a range of alternative scenarios. The base scenario is based on current population projections and a continuation of current patterns of care; alternative scenarios consider demographic variations (impact of varying migration and life expectancy levels on the projected numbers of older people, variations in the availability of informal care, increases in healthy life expectancy) and variations in patterns of care (including the impact of low-level preventative care and decreasing use of residential care).
More information
For more information, please download our information leaflet or contact us.