About Planning4care

What is Planning4care?

Planning4care is a strategic needs assessment tool and analytic service that estimates and projects levels of need for social care in the local population. It helps commissioners make sense of the mass of data available by providing the analysis that is needed to support the planning and commissioning of future services. This dynamic tool has been developed by the Planning4care team with social care and data analysis expertise drawn from the consultancies Care Equation and Oxford Consultants for Social Inclusion (OCSI). The tool has been tested in Brighton & Hove and is now available.

How does it work?

The Planning4care service bases its analysis on the LEAP model - Local Evidence Adjusted Prevalence - devised by the development team. The tool follows the PSSRU/ Wanless national projection 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 over-65 population expected to fall into each of those groups.

A particular innovation is the use of local needs-related risk factors to derive estimates and projections that reflect the profiles of individual localities as closely as possible.

The estimates are then linked to the types of service packages and costs that may provide different levels of support and/or meet specific outcomes. Two standard scenarios are included in the tool, the first projecting continuation of current patterns of care and the second an outcome based scenario. There is also the facility to add further scenarios to explore locally defined service patterns and to project potential consequences of changes in eligibility, health levels, provision of informal care and unit costs.

How will it help commissioners?

Understanding the needs of populations is a key step to effective commissioning. Joint Strategic Needs Assessments must include a view of the future, predicting and anticipating the care needs of the whole population, including people funding their own care. This is where Planning4care can help you:

• Planning4care provides robust analysis of current and future need, to inform the planning stage of the commissioning cycle
• Planning4care provides answers to a series of key questions and “what-if...” scenarios which all commissioners are going to need to address as part of their joint strategic needs assessment. The analysis will be available in a standard report that can be produced for any local authority area
• Planning4care helps commissioners 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
• Planning4care can provide 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 will provide a combination of standard products and services that can be tailored to your needs. Typically this will include:

• 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.

For more information, please download our information leaflet or contact us.