Financing Personalised Social Care

CIPFA’s Social Care Finance Forum (SCFAN) is pleased to announce its 2010 programme of activities for social care finance. These build on well-supported programmes geared towards social care based finance staff. They provide a programme of local events specifically designed to support adult social care finance practitioners. The 2009 calendar year saw an excellent growth in the practitioner take up of social care events with delegate numbers approaching 400 with some 300 delegate e-mail enquiries being resolved.

The programme has been designed to complement the activities of the CIPFA Social Care Panel. Those involved with Adult Social Care Services finance are facing huge changes including budgetary pressures and the challenges of supporting an increasingly ageing population within the UK.

Personalisation means that social care is on the brink of its most radical change in 50 years. Individual budgets hold the promise of allowing people to shape public services to meet their needs, by turning users into innovators and investors who design and commission their own services. This promise must be balanced against the financial restraints of one of the worst recessions since the 1930's and Adult Social Care professionals will need to rise to this challenge. They will need to find ways of responding to the increasing numbers and needs of those with learning and other disabilities in the context of calls for increasing levels of direct payments and individual budgets in the expectation that these demands can be funded from ever-increasing efficiency savings. There will also need to be a way of addressing the continuing changes in the legislative and service environment including the future regulation and possible joint working of health and adult social care.

Workshop Events

There will be five workshop themes addressed this year (including a mini-series of 2 events)

Personalisation Update -- March\April 2010 – Resource Allocation – and – Self Directed Support Processes. Whilst there are some 20 authorities in the vanguard of personal budgets there are over 100 who are still developing their approaches. This series of events will update authorities on progress in this very important area.

Accounting Options for Social Care – May\June 2010 – This series will examine the latest thoughts and any published guidance on possible accounting approaches to the new social care agenda. Authorities will be encouraged to share any approaches they have developed or are in the process of developing, with their peers.

Personalisation - Systems – June\July 2010 - As more people demand “direct payments” – then at least half of those in receipt of social care support will want to receive a direct payment for part or all of the care they receive. Most Councils are looking at payment cards as the way to handle this. Most also expect to use social care systems as the key source of information for each individual with a much more significant financial component than has been the case previously.

Responding to the Demographic Challenge - Increased Emphasis on Transforming Social Care Financial Management -- September 2010 – There will be a need to shift the emphasis of Social Care Financial Management to support transformation, involving priority based budgeting especially in the context of the significant efficiencies agenda and the need to review what we can and cannot do.

Pulling Together the Threads – Transforming Social Care Finance – October\November 2010 – This mini series of 2 events will pull together the main lessons from the previous series and will explore further how social Care finance will need to be transformed to meet the challenges of the demographic pressures facing the UK in the coming years.

There are five countrywide venues covered in each series which should provide practitioners with a much greater choice in attending and benefiting from our support to them. The service plan for 2010 is specified at the top of this page.