Projecting future requirements for residential care and extra-care housing

Projecting the future requirement for residential care in Leeds

“Planning4care has given us a more robust understanding of the scale of the future care needs of our older population, enabling us to generate options for the future provision of residential care and the development of extra care housing on a much sounder basis”, Deputy Director Strategic Commissioning, Leeds City Council

Leeds City Council commissioned analysis from Planning4care to assess the need for long-term residential care and associated day care services for older people, in order to develop appropriate and cost-effective future care services for the city’s older population.

The needs analysis was framed around three questions:

What are the current and projected social care needs for older people in Leeds?
What are the current service levels across Leeds, and how do service levels compare to needs levels?
Which groups among the older population are most likely to need access to residential care or other intensive-level social care services?

The Planning4care analysis enabled Leeds to:

identify the total numbers of older people within the city currently estimated to have particular levels of social care need, and compare these with current service provision;
estimate the expected future growth over the next 20 years of the numbers of older people in the city with different levels of need under a range of different assumptions concerning life expectancy, healthy life expectancy, future shifts in care patterns, and the potential impact of successful preventative initiatives;
set these estimates against recent trends in the current range of provision for people with the most intensive levels of need (including residential care, intensive home care, extra care housing);
identify the potential future shortfall in the provision of residential care and/or the need for substitution by other forms of high intensity provision.

Developing residential and extra care housing in Cumbria

Planning4care was also commissioned by Cumbria County Council to quantify the likely future shortfall in LA-funded residential care under the continuation of recent trends, and enable Cumbria to identify the options available to meet that shortfall on a local geographic basis.

Planning4care also provided an independent analysis of the projected requirements for extra care housing in the Allerdale district of Cumbria – an area characterised by an above-average projected increase in the older population – providing a sound and defensible basis for negotiations between the council and commercial developers concerning future development plans.