29.10.19
Getting personal: Calculating the cost of care
Source: NHE SEPT-OCT 19
Hugh Reynolds, clinical director at Liaison Care, outlines how Liaison can help support CCGs to accurately calculate personal health budgets.
Reports earlier this year by the BBC claimed that thousands of vulnerable patients in England are missing out on NHS funding for care that they are legally entitled to with some families saying they have spent nearly all their life savings on filling the gaps.
NHS Continuing Healthcare (CHC) covers the cost of health and social care for people with complex needs, provided they meet the CHC eligibility criteria which is set out in the National Framework for NHS Continuing Healthcare and NHS Funded Nursing Care (2018).
With the ever more complex health needs of an ageing population comes a need to allocate care that matches the individual’s needs. At Liaison Care we have a resource allocation system which supports clinical commissioning groups (CCGs) in calculating CHC costs and deliver them through personal health budgets.
The Liaison CareCalculator has been created to support CCGs in accurately calculating indicative personal health budgets to support the personalisation of patient care. By predicting the cost of care based on patients’ needs, their complexity and the amount of support from family and friends, the calculator only allocates funding to address unmet needs.
In the BBC report, Julie Wood, chief executive of NHS Clinical Commissioners - the umbrella body for the 191 CCGs in England - said continuing healthcare was "a complex area", but that CCGs were "working hard to improve systems and processes to make it better and fairer for those that need it".
Our business supports over 60% of the CCGs in England, supporting them in the transformation of their end-to-end CHC services. Liaison Care does this through CHC audits, consultancy, technology, benchmarking and reporting tools. The support it provides to CCGs has a real impact in the transformation of their CHC service and is aligned to NHS England’s aims of providing better outcomes, better experiences and better use of resources for patients.
In February 2019 Walsall CCG and Walsall Council commissioned Liaison Care to recommend or develop a suitable assessment and resource allocation system to support the management of their jointly funded care packages.
We proposed that we would use the Liaison Health and Social Care Assessment to capture the individuals needs and use the Liaison CareCalculator to accurately predict the costs of care based on needs recorded in the assessment for patients who were not eligible for CHC but potentially funded by both health and social care.
The Liaison Health and Social Care Assessment was developed as a holistic assessment tool to capture the individual’s needs across both health and social care. It was developed using the domains from the Decision Support Tool (DST) from the National Framework for CHC and FNC (2018) and the Care Act (2014).
The outcome of the project in Walsall was that by using Liaison CareCalculator they could accurately predict the costs of care to plus or minus 1% and that Walsall CCG and Walsall Council had the evidence for making an informed decision about how to accurately split the cost of jointly funded care packages.
Our vision for CHC is that transformation must improve the experience of the individual going through the CHC process of assessment of eligibility. The range of expert skills across our organisation are key to delivering a strong product base. We have a clear desire to support CCGs and CSUs in transforming the way CHC is delivered through working in partnership with all stakeholders.
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