CIPFA’s Finance Advisory Network (FAN) is pleased to announce the 2009 programme of activities for social care finance. These build on well-supported programmes for corporate and children’s services-based finance staff. They provide a programme of local events specifically designed to support finance staff in Adult Social Care with practical programmes of practitioner-based support. The 2008 calendar year saw an excellent growth in the practitoner take up of social care events with delegate numbers in excess of 300 with the average event attendance totalling 24.

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

Personalisation means that social care is on the brink of its most radical hange 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 of health and adult social care.

There will be four workshop themes addressed this year ( one more than in 2008)

• Personalisation – Resource Allocation Update – March 2009 – An update on the Latest Developments in Resource Allocation.
• Personalisation – Costing - May 2009 – exploring the benefits of and application of marginal and unit costing to adult social care - for example – for the costing of packages of support – ensuring only resources which can be allocated are costed – and - for service costing including the comparison of and tracking of unit costs.
• Personalisation and Transformation – Efficiency and Commissioning – July 2009 – developing at least three year commissioning and efficiency plans – which make the most of the prevention and personalisation agenda while minimising dual running costs through well planned decommissioning.
• Personalisation – Accounting and Systems – October 2009 – an update on developments in accounting and systems arrangements – for the financial management and monitoring of personal budgets.

There will now be five countrywide venues covered in each series which should provide practitoners with a much greater choice in attending and benefiting from our support to them. The service plan for 2009 is specified at the top of this page.