Dates: 1 June 2017 - 31 March 2019
Funder: NIHR School for Social Care Research
Project description
There are never enough resources to meet every need or to satisfy every want. This applies as much to social care as it does to any other area or system in any society across the world. Consequently, difficult choices have to be made about how to use the resources that are available. Decision-makers in local authorities, provider organisations, fieldwork teams - and in fact also individual service users and carers (especially those with personal budgets or who are self-funders) – therefore have to weigh up the pros and cons of different ways of using their resources or spending their budgets.
Those decision-makers will want to think through a number of considerations when deciding how to allocate their personal or organisational resources. One of those considerations is how to achieve the greatest beneficial outcomes from a given level of resources.
Well-conducted economic evaluations can provide decision-makers will information that can help them face up to the difficulty of not having sufficient resources to meet needs. These evaluations show the costs of two or more different interventions (such as two or more different services or preventive strategies) and the relative outcomes that will result. Those outcomes could include improved well-being for individuals with social care needs or their carers, greater independence in the activities of daily living, more choice and control over the services received, and better support so that people can contribute to their families and to society in ways that are important to them.
This study aim to collate and build economic evidence and make it available to decision-makers in England’s adult social care system to inform their decisions.
Methods
The study will cover as many different social care interventions as possible In this project. The research team will summarise the economic evidence where there has already been good research. Where there is no such evidence at the moment they will try to generate new findings using a range of ‘modelling’ techniques that aim to simulate what the cost and outcome consequences would be from (say) partial previous evaluations or using data held by local authorities.
The findings for each intervention will be summarised in ways that make the findings understandable to a wide range of people.
Further project information
Principal Investigator at LSE: Professor Martin Knapp
CPEC Research team: Jose-Luis Fernandez, Michela Tinelli, Annette Bauer
Countries: England
Keywords: economics, social care
Contact
Martin Knapp
m.knapp@lse.ac.uk