CM Local Authorities

Surrey county council’s cabinet has approved the closure of six care homes in the area that provide residential care, respite, daycare and reablement services.

York council has abandoned plans to build two care homes as it can no longer find anyone to develop them at a price it can afford. It now intends to reach out to independent providers to fill the shortfall in capacity in the city.

Local authority commissioners should consider allowing providers to be more flexible in how they use the contracted time when providing homecare services, according to draft guidance from the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE). It also puts stricter restrictions on the commissioning of 15-minute care visits.

The first fully integrated’ health and social care authority is to be established in Greater Manchester. The 10 local authorities, 12 clinical commissioning groups and 14 NHS providers will be responsible for the regions £6bn health and social care budget.

Only around 6.5% of the value of community service contracts due to expire this year will be subject to competitive procurement, research by Monitor suggests.

The NHS may have to support up to 1m more older people with serious illnesses within the next ten years, research from the International Longevity Centre (ILC-UK) has concluded. With services almost at breaking point, this massive increase in demand could herald a new wave of intermediate, reablement and preventative care services.

Funding for councils to carry out assessments for self-paying service users under the Care Act has been reduced, a Department of Health (DH) consultation response shows.

A new guidance document from the British Geriatrics Society (BGS) is calling on commissioners to prioritise preventative support for older people when designing healthcare services.

In the latest judicial review concerning the setting of local authority care home fees, a High Court judge has ruled that top-up fees paid by self-funding residents cannot be included in calculations of usual costs’. The important ruling will now set a precedent as councils’ prepare to set their rates for 2015-16.

Council spending on adult social care services dropped by 1% in real terms in 2013-14, the latest figures from the Health and Social Care Information Centre (HSCIC) show. Over a five year period from 2008-09, expenditure has decreased by 3% in real terms, most sharply when budget cuts introduced by the coalition government post-2010 began to bite.