Social Care Futures

This article originally featured in Care England’s Agenda Magazine on 4th August 2020.

At Future Care Capital, we undertake research to help policymakers and practitioners navigate broad-ranging developments in health and social care – placing particular emphasis upon the growing use of data and technology to transform services and, crucially, outcomes for our charitable beneficiaries.

To date, we have explored the risks and opportunities that different parts of the country face in planning and managing adult social care provision. We have examined structural changes to the residential care home market in England as well as undertaking a deep dive into the financial stability of providers. We have, also, analysed the approach taken to and funds disbursed by local authorities to secure residential care for people with broad-ranging needs.

In each instance, we have had to grapple with the lack of standardised, timely and sufficiently granular information, and our calls for government investment in the digitisation of social care – together with the data infrastructure that we believe should underpin commissioning, provision and regulation – have struggled to gain traction amongst key decision-makers. Now, in the midst of the ongoing public health emergency, whether you are a Minister, an official, a health or social care professional – let alone an anxious family member – it is all too clear that you are hampered when trying to make sense of what has happened (and continues to happen) in the care sector.

With that in mind, we have:

• launched a Social Care Data Finder to help you access up to date information made publicly available by local and central government and would warmly welcome your suggestions as to how we might improve upon it.
• joined forces with the Health Foundation to Strengthen Social Care Analytics and offer practical support to co-produce change from the ground-up – working with commissioners, providers as well as service users.
• agreed to collaborate with academic institutions to investigate the scope to deploy data in order to predict care market instability and help providers in financial distress.

We recognise that you are working tirelessly to restore the range of social care services upon which our beneficiaries rely as well as to prepare for the weeks and months ahead – whatever they might hold. The Comprehensive Spending Review will also, doubtless, serve to concentrate minds (and efforts) across the sector in the near term. This is as it should be in the circumstances, but we must also look to the future and hope that you will engage with us to ensure that what results is a care sector that is fit for purpose in the 21^st century.