07.06.19
Delivering personal health budgets with the Liaison Care Calculator
Supporting health and social care organisations deliver Personal Health Budgets for continuing healthcare and jointly funded packages of care is now achievable with a new tool launched by Liaison Care. Hugh Reynolds, clinical director at Liaison Care, reports.
The introduction of Personal Health Budgets (PHBs) has been a challenge for Clinical Commissioning Groups (CCGs) as this has come at a time when CCGs have been focusing on delivering against the new National Framework for CHC and FNC (2018).
Liaison Care has introduced the Liaison Care Calculator - a resource allocation system which supports CCGs in accurately calculating indicative personal health budgets.
Liaison Care helps the health economy to identify and deliver strategic improvements and process efficiencies, to increase savings for reinvestment into the delivery and management of NHS Continuing Healthcare (CHC) and NHS Funded Nursing Care (FNC). Liaison Care has developed a range of products and services which can support CHC improvements and help CCGs deliver a PHB programme in an accurate and sustainable way.
Frequently we read that the NHS needs more money, which I do believe to be true, but I also believe that the NHS must ensure that it spends the money it currently has as efficiently as possible. Financial accountability and applying best value principles would ensure that NHS organisations consider how they spend their money and can then confidently estimate how much additional money they need to delivery an exceptional health service for everyone.
The Liaison Care Calculator has been created to support CCGs in calculating indicative personal health budgets to support the personalisation of patient care. It achieves this by predicting the cost of care based on the needs and complexity of the individual.
By considering the levels of needs that are currently being met through the support from family and friends or where the needs are already being met by an existing service, the calculator only allocates funding to unmet needs.
The Liaison Care Calculator is configurable to reflect the policy decisions of each CCG and the costs of care in their area.
It is also directly linked to the continuing healthcare decision support tool (DST) so there is no need to gather additional information as all of this will have been collected when eligibility was determined.
The Liaison Care Calculator;
- Is an accurate, sustainable and defensible method of resource allocation.
- Is integrated within existing CHC and social care processes.
- Uses already available information and Health and Social Care Assessment to calculate the indicative budget and the split of responsibility between health and social care.
- Uses an assessment which is based on two legal frameworks -The Care Act 2014 and The National Framework for NHS Continuing Healthcare and NHS Funded Nursing Care 2018.
- Is transparent: a clear and simple approach to how budgets are calculated
- Is evidence-based, demonstrating a strong relationship between needs/costs
- Easy-to-use: ensuring PHBs are the default and ‘business as usual’ rather than a specialist service
What are the service benefits of the Care Calculator?
- Provides a needs-based way of calculating personal budgets
- Promotes consistency in assessment practice
- Simplifies the process from assessment to care planning or prescription
- Removes the guess work out of the calculation of indicative budgets
- Ensures budgets are calculated using the same assessment and formula
- Eliminates variation of provision for same needs
- Gives an essential framework for support planning
- Enables financial and budgetary planning and control
- Allows for benchmarking between service user groups
- Acts as the evidence base for challenges to decisions
To find out more about how the Liaison Care Calculator can support your CCG in calculating personal health budgets and personalise the delivery of your patients’ care, please get in touch or find out how Walsall CCG is using the Liaison CareCalculator.
About Liaison Care: As a long-term partner of the NHS, our experts are passionate about developing and implementing service improvement plans, new technologies, training and staff development to support CCGs improve their end-to-end delivery of CHC.
If you’d like to find out more then speak to a member of the Liaison Care team today on 0845 603 9000 or email [email protected] / visit: www.liaisongroup.com.