What
is it for?
FLoSC (Forecasting Length of Stay and Cost) assists local councils
to analyse the patterns of length of stay (LOS) for publicly funded residents
in institutional long-term care (LTC); and forecast cost of a council’s
existing, known commitments for a period of time. The term known commitments
refers to the group of publicly funded residents currently in residential
care and nursing care.
Why bother?
Local councils in England have a legal obligation for the placement
and finance of all publicly funded residents in institutional LTC. Furthermore,
the ability to discharge elderly patients to LTC is essential in the planning
and running of acute hospital care. As our population is ageing, it is
generally believed that LTC will become an important issue for an ageing
society.
Residential and nursing
care cost councils with social services responsibility in England an average
of £45m per year in 2005/06 – 47% of total spending on adult
social care. Given limited resources available, local authorities have
a keen interest in knowing the behaviour of the LTC system, in particular,
how long residents stay in the system, and ultimately, how much the system
will cost. However, local councils face real challenges when it comes
to annual budget planning for funding the system of LTC. Uncertainty about
the long-term cost of caring for current residents in the system, in addition
to unknown future admissions, have made the tasks of local council budget
managers very complex and demanding.
FLoSC is a software
implementation of a novel forecasting framework developed by researchers
at the Health and Social Care Modelling Group (HSCMG) of the University
of Westminster to assist local council budget planners involved in long
term care. It aims to quantify the source of uncertainty related to known
and unavoidable commitments and forecasts the resulting financial impact.
How can it
help?
Knowing the projected cost associated with known commitments
is of particular interest to local councils as it corresponds to the burden
that they cannot escape. This information will enable local councils to
identify the fraction of their budget that is already committed due to
past admission decisions. Given this information, local councils will
have a fair idea about the resources available for new admissions in a
financial year. FLoSC can also be used to compare forecasts under different
cost scenarios, which may reflect possible future changes in pricing or
costing policy. These functionalities are of crucial importance to the
planning of a successful budget for LTC at local authority level.
How is it
done?
FLoSC extracts high level patterns of residents' LOS and movements
in institutional LTC based on data routinely captured by local councils,
such as date of admission, date of discharge, destination of discharge,
etc. Further, average weekly cost for each type of care, namely residential
care (RC) and nursing care (NC), is incorporated to give a forecast of
the cost arising from looking after the known commitments.
More detailed information
on the methodology behind the toolkit can be found in the Methods
section.
Who developed
it?
FLoSC was developed by the Health
and Social Care Modelling Group (HSCMG) of the University
of Westminster for the Care
Services Efficiency Delivery (CSED) Program of the Department
of Health.
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