The Health and Social Care Modelling Group (HSCMG) designed the Forecasting Length of Stay and Costs tool (FLoSC) (external link) to help councils forecast the cost of its existing, known commitments for people in residential and nursing care.
FLoSC enables local councils to analyse the patterns of length of stay for publicly funded residents in long-term institutional care. This allows a council to make informed decisions about the resources it has to allocate.
Preparation and Analysis of Data (FLoSC-PAD) manages the data going into FLoSC and makes it easier to use. It can also be used as a stand-alone tool to provide summary statistics on time and movements.
FLoSC and FLoSC-PAD were developed for the Care Services Efficiency Delivery Programme by the Health and Social Care Modelling Group at the University of Westminster. They're free for councils and primary care trusts to download from the FLoSC website (external link)
Using the tool
The projected cost of known social care commitments provided by FLoSC is important to a council because it sets out what is already spent on people in residential care. This information tells the council what resources it has available in that financial year for new placements.
It can also compare forecast costs under different cost scenarios. For example, future changes in pricing or costing policy.
It uses patterns in residents' length of stay and movements in long-term care and links this to the average weekly cost for each type of care. This gives a forecast of the ongoing cost for people who are already in care homes.
The main issue with using FLoSC is getting the right data and changing it into a form that can be used. FLoSC-PAD enables budget planners to prepare data for FLoSC. The tutorial provided is designed to give users a step-by-step guide to producing and interpreting reports.
Contact details
email: hscmg@westminster.ac.uk
Health and Social Care Modelling Group (HSCMG)
School of Informatics
University of Westminster
115 New Cavendish Street
London, W1W 6UW