How do Local Authorities Commission Social Care Services
Local health and social care services are vital in ensuring individuals’ physical and mental wellbeing. Local authorities play a pivotal role in shaping health and social care services across the community.
As you are probably aware it is the role and responsibility of your local authority to ensure you’re your local population receives high-quality, efficient, and responsive care when they need it.
But how best can your local authority commission health and social care services? What are the challenges that need to be addressed? And how best can these challenges be avoided?
At The Access Group, we are aware of the challenges facing the health and social care market as well as the impacts limiting budgets and rising demands have on local authorities when ensuring the accessibility of health and social care services across the community.
We know that local authorities are aware that investing in digital solutions and local government software is a good step forward to commissioning and delivering better health and social care services in line with their responsibilities in the Care Act. But we also know from our recent Social Care Commissioning Report, that one of the biggest concerns when commissioning health and social care services is investing in technology that doesn’t work, in fact, nearly a fifth of respondents voted that as their biggest concern.
By the end of this article, you will know and understand the best ways your local authority can commission your health and social care services by overcoming the challenges faced by the market, as well as the importance of digitally transforming your services correctly to get the best return on investment.
Local Health and social care services – What are they?
Local health and social care services tend to be the responsibility and provided by local governments. However, the services provided by local authorities can vary depending on the region and the specific needs of the community.
Regardless of the services delivered local authorities play a pivotal role in ensuring that all health and social care services are accessible, responsive, and of high quality to meet the diverse needs of the local community.
Local authorities directly provide and commission a range of health and social care services including primary healthcare, social care support, mental health services, public health initiatives, and emergency medical services.
To deliver local health and social care services it’s the responsibility of all local authorities to assess the health and social needs of their communities to develop strategic plans and policies that guide the delivery of services and allocation of resources.
Once assessments have taken place, local authorities commission services from a mix of public, private, and voluntary sectors to best meet the demand. However, this has started to become more complex with individual needs changing, demand increasing, and budgets getting more limited.
Local health and social care services are only successful when local authorities regulate health and social care providers to follow legislation, guidelines, as well as their responsibilities under the Care Act to ensure that they meet the regulatory standards and deliver high-quality, safe, and effective services.
Some of the best local health and social care services collaborate with multiple organsiations to promote public health and prevent ill health by implementing strategies to better address the health inequalities across the community. This includes collaborating with services targeted across all demographics such as children and family services, youth justice services, and even housing, as this helps your local authority better address the social determinants of health to promote physical and mental health across the community.
What is the local service delivery in health and social care?
Local service deliveries in health and social care refer to the actual provision of services to meet the needs of residents across your local authority.
Here your local service delivery can address health disparities to support individuals in leading healthier and more fulfilling lives.
Some of the most common components in local service delivery in health and social care include:
- Primary healthcare services – to encompass preventative care, treatment of common illnesses, and management of chronic conditions
- Community health programs – to target specific health issues such as smoking, nutrition education, or sexual health
- Mental Health Support – Better address mental health conditions at the local level including therapy and counselling
- Home care and social care support services – To offer support services to individuals who require assistance with activities of daily living due to illness, disability, or aging
- Social Services – To provide support and assistance to individuals and families facing various challenges including homelessness, unemployment, and financial concerns
- Long-Term Care Facilities – Including nursing, residential, and assisted living facilities, long-term care facilities to provide accommodation and support to individuals who require ongoing assistance
- Health education and outreach – to raise awareness about important health issues, promote healthy behaviours, and encourage preventative care
- Coordination and collaboration – To ensure services are accessible, integrated, and responsive to the needs of the community
As well as following key governmental legislation including The Care Act 2014 and The Health and Social Care Act 2012, local authorities have the responsibility to ensure their health and social care local service delivery is accessible to everyone across the community to ensure no one goes without the support they need and deserve.
Local Health and Social Care Services – Why are they important?
Delivering and implementing high-quality local health and social care services are crucial for multiple reasons. Ultimately, it allows your local authority to be more strategic with its commissioning to make better data-led decisions that matter to your community.
1. To promote and improve community wellbeing
Without having high-quality health and social care services across your local community, you cannot address the health and social care needs of individuals and families effectively.
By providing health and social care support that is catered to the individual needs of the community, care deliveries can shift from reactive to preventative and proactive enabling individuals to better manage their own mental and physical health and wellbeing.
Here by tackling the wider social determinants of health and acknowledging that health starts at home, individuals can be exposed to better preventative and early intervention support services to help them now and in the future.
2. Promotes the value of preventative care
By focusing on preventative care measures in both health and social care. Healthy behaviours and early detection of health and social care issues can happen sooner to prevent illnesses, and dependency on primary care, improve long-term health and social care outcomes as well as generate cost savings across the market.
3. Offers better support for vulnerable populations
To deliver local authorities’ responsibilities under the Care Act, many local authorities are now optimising their population health approach. This is important as it will enable your local authority to better target support to more vulnerable and underserved populations including older adults, children, and individuals living with disabilities or facing socioeconomic challenges.
4. Delivers better holistic care
Local authorities working alongside multiple stakeholders enables them to take a better holistic approach when addressing community needs. Here by recognising health is influenced by social, economic, and environmental factors, primary care, secondary care, social care, housing, and mental health support organisations can work together to address the complex needs of individuals more effectively.
5. Promotion of independence
High-quality local health and social care services are important because they aim to empower individuals to live independently for longer, especially older adults, and people living with disabilities or chronic diseases.
By providing home care, assistive technology, technology enabled care, and rehabilitation services individuals can maintain their autonomy and quality of life with the reassurance support will be there when needed.
6. Reduction of health inequalities
By taking a holistic approach to health and social care, the accessibility to these services improve which is essential to reduce health inequalities and disparities within communities.
When health and social care services are accessible, affordable, and culturally sensitive, local authorities can address systemic barriers to health and social care to improve outcomes, especially for underserved or vulnerable populations.
How do local authorities commission local services?
As you will be most likely aware, there are many ways to commission local services depending on the needs of your community. With local authorities being encouraged to follow both population health and strength-based approaches it can be difficult to determine which method is best for your local community.
Despite there being multiple options, the majority of local authorities use the commissioning cycle in some form, aiming to meet the care needs of people to ensure they receive the support they need to fulfil their lives.
1. Needs Assessment
To understand what health and social care services are needed in your community, your local authorities must understand their needs and preferences. Often this can be found through local authorities and commissioning bodies gathering data on health and social care, as well as receiving feedback from individuals and stakeholders.
2. Planning
Based on the results of the needs assessments, local authorities must prioritise and set objectives for their service delivery. Here detailed and strategic plans are developed to outline the types of services required, the expected outcomes, and how these services will be delivered and evaluated.
3. Service Design
To get the best outcomes, your local authority should involve individuals, health and social care providers, as well as other stakeholders in the design of services to ensure they are tailored to your local needs. By co-producing services together better evidence-based practices can be followed to enhance your service's effectiveness further.
4. Procurement
Once all services have been co-designed, your local authority will then enter its procurement stage. Often this is when some of the most common challenges in commissioning health and social care services occur.
Again there are many options whether it's a DPS (Direct Purchasing System), E-procurement or more traditional procurement methods. This process is often competitive and transparent enabling the best providers to be selected according to your criteria, regulations, price, and quality.
5. Contracting
After the procurement and tendering process is complete, agreements with providers are finalised. Here outcomes improve when your local authority defines the terms of service delivery, performance expectations, and monitoring agreements.
6. Service delivery
Once contracts are signed, providers then begin to implement and deliver their services. To get the best outcomes your local authority should ensure they provide ongoing support to help address any challenges that arise.
7. Evaluation
To ensure the best outcomes regularly reviewing the performance is vital. Here the collection of feedback from both individuals and stakeholders helps identify areas for improvement, enabling better outcomes-based commissioning, so when necessary adjustments are needed they can be made quickly and efficiently without reducing the quality of the service.
8. Recommissioning
Periodic reviews are essential to continue services being commissioned and delivered. The results of these reviews determine whether services should continue, be modified, or be removed altogether.
Local health and social care services – What are the challenges?
With every local authority having different needs to address constantly, as you are aware you can face multiple challenges and barriers at the same time, some examples include:
- Resource and Budget Constraints
- Managing Demand
- Coordinating Care
- Ensuring Quality Assurance and Performance Monitoring
- Procurement Challenges
- Encouraging Innovation
- Building an Experienced Workforce
Resource and Budget Constraints
Juggling the limited budgets makes it harder to enable strategic resource allocation. Here the limited budgets make it difficult to fund all the necessary services adequately and address all the complex and diverse needs of the community.
Managing Demand
Another common challenge is managing the rising demand of individuals living with multiple needs and living with commonly more than one condition. The aging population living with more complex needs is also adding extra pressure on both health and social care services.
Coordinating Care
Often health and social care services are provided by different organisations this can be challenging for some local authorities to coordinate to enable providers to work together to improve their resource allocation. This, in turn, can also create difficulties in integrating these services to provide seamless and holistic care and support to individuals.
Ensuring quality assurance and performance monitoring
Managing demand and service deliveries can be challenging to manage and monitor, especially in social care where qualitative aspects are significant.
Maintaining standards whilst managing differing needs and challenges can be difficult especially when ensuring consistency across different providers.
Procurement Challenges
Ensuring a fair and transparent tendering process that attracts high-quality providers can be challenging. With one of the biggest challenges and concerns being able to effectively manage provider risks and failure, effective management of contracts is imperative to achieve desired outcomes so even if there is provider failure the quality of care does not reduce.
Encouraging Innovation
Currently, it is becoming essential that local authorities invest in digital. This process isn’t always easy, implementing innovative service delivery models and best practices whilst managing risks associated with change can make processes long-winded, and expensive, and can require significant amounts of time to train workforces.
Building an experienced workforce
For many local authorities across the UK, staff retention and recruitment are proving a massive challenge. The limited funding makes it harder to employ support workers and care workers in the long-term meaning many leave for more permanent ones, and some end up leaving the profession altogether due to care worker stress and burnout.
How can technology help commission local service provision in health and social care?
Ultimately investing in technology solutions and embarking on your local government’s digital transformation journey enhances the commissioning of your local service provision in health and social care by improving efficiency, accuracy, and effectiveness across all stages in the commissioning process. This, in turn, not only helps you improve outcomes, and improve both the physical and mental wellbeing of the whole community, but also allows your local government to achieve digital maturity and create a continuous improvement environment that focuses on delivering outcomes-based care that matters to the individual.
1. Data Analytics
Having access to advanced analytics tools that can process high volumes of health and social care data helps to identify trends, patterns, as well as areas of need, and improvements within the community to enable more outcomes-based commissioning focusing on individual needs.
Here at The Access Group, we know the importance of turning data into actionable intelligence to support your commissioning, market shaping, and oversight responsibilities.
Access PAMMS is an example of a suite of solutions that help increase market intelligence and understanding, care quality, and service sustainability in today’s fragile market. Currently over 60 councils already rely on Access PAMMs every day for evidence to help improve care services.
Our Social Care Landscape provides sophisticated analytics and insight tools that bring together a wide range of datasets to provide easy and accessible visibility of key information. Here this real-time analysis enables your local authority to have everything you need to know about population and demand, spending and activity, capacity and availability, as well as quality risk to ensure you can commission and deliver the best quality care and support across the community.
2. Commissioning and Procurement Platforms
Being able to manage demand, contracts, and the different providers your local authority works with is essential to improving health and social care outcomes.
Investing in commissioning and procurement platforms helps diminish administrative burdens, commission services quicker, and ultimately enables better co-production approaches to take place to connect commissioners with a wider range of service providers to improve competition and make it easier to find and compare potential providers according to your criteria.
At Access Adam Care Commissioning, our cloud-based end-to-end solutions manage your entire workflow in one place to help your teams reach targets and both efficiently and confidently place individuals into the correct service.
Here our automation of compliance ensures all the providers you work with are compliant and meet any additional requirements needed. This, in turn, reduces administrative costs through streamlined processes and eligibility to make decisions over 25% faster.
3. Enhanced Service Delivery Platforms
Ultimately investing in digital technology enables your local authority to improve the quality and consistency of the health and social care services you provide.
Investing in care management software helps support the delivery of care with a range of real-time care monitoring, mobile monitoring, scheduling, and financial management. At Access CM our mobile app helps support workers reduce workloads and time spent calling head offices to find out schedules and instead have access to all the information they need on the go and in real-time.
Addressing the complex needs of your community can be better managed through investing in telehealth and telecare technology. Here these technologies enable remote health and social care services to be delivered to increase access to care, increase independence, and in turn reduce dependency on primary care services by delaying future care needs.
Electronic Patient Records, also make it easier to facilitate the sharing of patient information to ease the transitions between health and social care services. Our Access Rio EPR system enables patient information to be shared across different care settings seamlessly to improve both care coordination and continuity.
We also go one step further by enabling integrations with additional systems to better manage referrals, reduce time duplicating information across systems, to ensure the majority of time is spent on helping individuals not on admin.
4. Outcome Measurement Tools
To deliver better outcomes-based commissioning, local authorities need to invest in effective outcome measurement tools that provide real-time updates to enable you to update care and support plans accordingly. This enables local authorities to deliver better preventative and person-centred care to help commissioners evaluate the effectiveness of services and make better data-driven decisions.
Here our Access Demand Modelling technology is a versatile market management tool to closely monitor local authorities’ activity levels to make highly accurate predictions about future demand to ensure the consistency of your health and social care services.
By combining statistical forecasting techniques with artificial intelligence long-term activity is analysed to identify trends and patterns to help local authorities better understand their demands now and in the future. Working alongside our risk profiler tool, your local authority will gain better insight and understanding of unexpected events, predict areas of risk, as well as information on budget management so no one goes without the care and support they need and deserve.
5. Population Health Platforms
Investing in digital population health platforms helps to improve collaboration with stakeholders into one centralised platform to help build confidence in your community to diminish gaps in your provision.
Investing in our Access Elemental Social Prescribing platform enables you to work with multiple stakeholders to identify at-risk populations to ensure the support they require is accessible. Here this can help raise awareness about the importance of addressing the wider social determinants of health to deliver better personalised care by linking datasets together across various sector systems and displaying dashboards that are specific to your goals, objectives, and targeted population.
Summarising how The Access Group can help commission your local health and social care services
This article has explored local authorities' key roles and responsibilities when delivering local provisions in health and social care and why they are important. By evaluating the importance of local health and social care services, this article has also explored some of the key challenges local authorities face when trying to improve the quality of their services, deliver their responsibilities of the Care Act, and ensure all care and support is tailored to the individual.
By addressing the key challenges across the health and social care market it is highlighted that two of the major challenges are budget and resource limitations. This article has addressed there are multiple ways this can be overcome by investing in technology and strategically planning your digital transformation journey to get the best outcomes.
This article has demonstrated some key ways technology solutions can help whether that’s to streamline the procurement processes, enhance care plans, undergo an effective population health approach, optimise care plans, or increase independence, our local government software provides endless opportunities to improve workflows and processes to both better plan and commission services now and in the future.
Start your digital transformation journey with us today by contacting us and we can co-produce a plan together to focus on your local authority’s objectives to best meet demand at a fraction of the price and time, whilst ensuring the highest quality services possible for everyone in your community.
