Abstract

Cuts to social care budgets have impacted and are still impacting the targeting of services, which have gradually focused on those social care users with the highest levels of needs. In this paper we describe the patterns of services provided in three different local authorities, along with the distribution of lifetime costs, focusing in particular on the highest percentiles.

The availability of administrative data deriving from local authorities’ databases, gives us the opportunity to discuss the potential for the use of these records in social care. More importantly, it allows us to analyse in depth the provision of care packages at individual level and observed longitudinally.

Using Latent Class Analysis, we identify groups of users based on their assigned care package. The aims of this paper are to (i) describe patterns of service use for each estimated latent class, (ii) describe difference between users by latent class (iii) describe the distribution of lifetime costs, focusing in detail on the most expensive cases.

Preliminary results suggest that care packages and the associated lifetime costs differ between the local authorities analysed, signalling the existence of local variations in social care support, although some of those differences could also be related to a certain degree of heterogeneity between the data collections.

Estimating care service outcomes from administrative records: challenges and opportunities