NEEDS BASED PLANNING

Needs based planning can be described as the process of combining evidence from both population needs assessment and individual needs assessment, together with information on supply and cost of services, policies and resource constraints, into plans for commissioning and resource allocations. We have been involved in this type of work since the early nineties. More recent projects include:

Project: Planning4care strategic needs assessment tool
Partners: Care Equation, Oxford Consultants for Social Inclusion, City of Brighton & Hove (pilot)
Dates: 2007

The aim of this development project was to build a web-based strategic needs assessment tool to support commissioning of care for older people. The development of the tool built on 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. An innovation developed by the project team 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 were then linked to "typical" types of service packages and costs, enabling future costs and service requirements to be projected.

The pilot work highlighted the importance of being able to examine different care scenarios. Two standard scenarios were included in the tool, the first projecting continuation of current patterns of care and the second an outcome based scenario. Facilities to explore locally defined service patterns and to project potential consequences of changes to informal care and unit costs were also included.

Plannning4care was launched in October 2007 and is set up to provide analysis for all local authorities in England up to 2027. The tool provides essential analysis for the social care element of Joint Strategic Needs Assessment for older people. For more information visit www.planning4care.com

Pilot feedback:

It's going to give us a more sophisticated model for planning demand, and the need for different types of services, in the long term – as well as getting a sense of the costs of those services.

Project: Needs-led planning for adult social care (older people and physical disabilities)
Client: Gloucestershire Social Services
Date: 2005

The aim of this project was to develop an action plan to achieve a more needs led approach to budgeting, service planning and monitoring of needs and service responses. Drawing on national research and best practice material we proposed a model which clarified the components of a needs led approach and then worked with a group of service development, finance, information and performance managers to appraise local progress, identify gaps and issues and develop an action plan. The action plan covered four main strands: Implementing a framework of needs classification for monitoring presenting needs and service responses, Population needs estimation and mapping, Projecting effects of population change, and Relative budget distribution to localities.

Client feedback:

The action plan took account of prior work, applied appropriate national research in the area of needs planning, and proposed a model that covered the full scope of issues we needed to be addressed. It was not over-complex. I was personally impressed with the speed and accuracy with which you were able to pick up this work from the various points that we had taken it to already, and understand our labyrinthine information systems. Both of these were vital pre-requisiters to designing the action plan.

Project: Development of a locality profile framework
Client: Macmillan Cancer Relief
Date: 2005

Macmillan plans and provides local services across the UK on the basis of localities (patches) linked to regional offices and Cancer Network boundaries. We were asked to help Macmillan develop a common approach to gathering and presenting data on need and on level of existing and planned provision, in order to support a more systematic gap analysis to underpin local and strategic direction. We identified key data sources and designed a template for bringing together quantitative information, on need and service provision, with qualitative data on priorities identified by users and by professional staff and managers.

Project: Predicting the need for children to be looked after
Client: London Borough of Newham
Dates: 2000-01

Undertaken in collaboration with National Children's Bureau

The overall aim of the study was to assist the social services department to understand the changes over time in the composition of its looked after children population, and to help predict possible future changes, especially in resources for placements. The main elements of the study were: inter-borough comparisons with authorities that closely matched the circumstances of the borough; a ten year perspective on underlying trends in needs, placements and costs; analysis of published data from DoH, CIPFA and ONS; local information from managers and staff to help understand local needs and service responses; and examination of the past, current and likely future impact of national policies to inform and predict patterns in the future.

Project: Methodological development of needs-based planning for community care of adults with mental health problems
Client: Department of Health
Dates: 2000

Care Equation worked in partnership with the PSSRU, University of Kent and the Sainsbury Centre for Mental Health to explore methods that can be used to support needs based planning for the mental health care of people aged 16-64, in order to produce guidance and toolkits for local action.

The project tested two different approaches to needs assessment in six pilot sites. The approach pursued by Care Equation and PSSRU developed a population needs assessment method linking definitions of need, adapted from local case records, with national data on mental health needs in the general population from the ONS Psychiatric Morbidity Survey. The project developed a framework of needs groups, a costing methodology for cost of care packages for different levels of need, and a method for estimating numbers in needs groups in different socio-economic localities.

Project: Methodology seminars on locality profiling for post-graduate diploma in community specialist practice
Client: Anglia Polytechnic University
Dates: 1999-2005

An annual series of seminars for community health students to enable them to undertake a needs assessment for community health services in a locality, define particular health priorities and make a case for service development.

See also Training and Workshops