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 Transform Magazine
Transform Magazine is for all Public Servants Seeking to Transform Local Public Service
We created Transform as a source of information to share helpful advice and showcase public service transformations in alignment with our goal of sharing best practice across the public sector. The magazine covers a wide variety of topics about local public service improvement across the UK.
Mobile Stories – January 2023
Only interested in one topic in particular? We’ve broke down the magazine into mobile stories allowing you to easily access the content you want to read at the touch of a button. Have a read of our mobile stories by clicking on the links below.
CareCubed is the next generation of digital care pricing which offers a secure online platform to support the open and transparent negotiation of care placements. It is now being used by almost half of all local authorities in England as both a day-to-day negotiation tool and strategic planning solution to map out future provision and plan for reform. Click here to read more.
CareCubed aids Fair Cost of Care exercise
While adult social care reform hangs in the balance, with changes proposed in the People at the Heart of Care White Paper outlining the Government’s ten-year social care reform delayed by the Chancellor’s Autumn statement, the Fair Cost of Care (FCOC) exercise has still been successful in giving greater visibility of the shape and state of local care markets. Click here to read more.
CareCubed and children’s reform: why doing nothing is no longer an option
While local authorities wait to see the Government’s plans for what has been hailed a ‘once-in-a-generation’ reform in children’s social care, it is possible to get ahead and start understanding and shaping local provision better now with the help of the market-leading strategy and negotiation tool CareCubed. Click here to read more.
Partnership helps councils use CareCubed strategically
CareCubed customers can now access specialist consultancy through iESE’s partner Peopletoo to help them maximise the benefits of CareCubed and ensure it is embedded into processes. Click here to read more.
Surrey County Council: CareCubed Children’s
Using CareCubed strategically has helped Surrey County Council (SCC) work with providers to increase the number of looked-after children aged 16- 18 staying in county , rather than being placed further afield – boosting this number from 35 per cent to 65 per cent – and has also delivered savings of around £1m on block contracts for beds in supported living accommodation. Click here to read more.
The London Borough of Hackney: CareCubed Children’s
The London Borough of Hackney started using CareCubed Children’s having seen the benefits of the tool for its adult care commissioning. The council first looked at its commissioning processes and streamlined these to make them much more efficient and effective. Then some of the council’s high-cost care placements were benchmarked against CareCubed to understand the market position, sustainability of providers and whether value for money was being achieved. This identified some significant outliers which needed to be understood and priced based on the support required. This resulted in the council delivering £200,000 per annum cost avoidance on just four existing placements. Click here to read more.
Surrey County Council: CareCubed Adult
Surrey County Council is one of the largest in England, serving a population of 1.2m across 11 District Councils. Surrey started using CareCubed in 2020 to help right price its learning disability placements in residential and supported living and hopes to start using it in other areas of adult social care to ensure fair and sustainable pricing throughout its services. Click here to read more.
Bristol City Council: CareCubed Adult Place-Based
Bristol City Council (BCC) were early adopters of the place- based licence of CareCubed – a version of the tool which allows local authorities to give restricted access to providers to enable them to input their own cost base. BCC started using CareCubed in 2020 when they realised the tool could replace the manual and labour-intensive way it had been gathering provider data in Excel spreadsheets to form guide prices for the Learning Disability (LD) market. BCC initially bought the council licence, but quickly switched to the place-based licence as an early adopter. Click here to read more.
At iESE we listen to user feedback from providers and local authorities on the CareCubed tool to continually develop its functionality and usability. We update the data behind the tool annually to reflect market changes and sometimes carry out an extraordinary release such as in November 2022 which took account of the cost-of-living crisis. Click here to read more.
Welcome Letter – January 2023
Reform is the current big agenda for both adult and children’s social care.
Whether this is driven centrally by government or not, both providers and Dr Andrew Larner, Chief Executive commissioners will agree that change is needed immediately to keep services running sustainably. Whatever changes are on the horizon, our unique care funding tool CareCubed is well placed to sit at the heart of any commissioning team now and in the future.
It can immediately help councils agree costings with providers for day-to- day placements and uplift requests by assisting fair and transparent negotiations based on regularly updated benchmarked costings. It is also being strategically used by local authorities to map out provision to meet future needs, including using the tool to conduct Cost of Care exercises beyond the mandated exercise for over-65s (see page 5). The platform also offers potential solutions to ease the challenges highlighted in two separate recent reports on the children’s market (see page 8).
There are several modules of CareCubed available covering both the adult and children’s market, either as a council licence, where council employees input costings received by providers, or as a place-based licence which allows local authorities to give limited access to providers to allow them to input their own costs. You can read case studies about how CareCubed is being used on pages 6 and 7.
As a not-for-profit, owned by the sector, for the good of the sector, iESE want to see local authorities and providers thrive and use CareCubed to best effect. We have recently joined forces with the consultancy PeopleToo to offer new subscribers access to a package of consultancy (see page 10), while our ongoing extensive value-added support helps all users get the best from the tool (see page 9).
Dr Andrew Larner and the iESE Team
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Transform Magazine Readership
Transform magazine is published on a quarterly basis within the following channels:
- It is directly posted to all Chief Executives and Council Leaders across the UK
- iESE online: published on our issuu site with a current readership of around 1200
- The MJ: a bound insert within the MJ which is circulated to 40,000 senior officer
- Solace: published within their newsletter which is distributed to their members and is available to view on their website
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