Overview
The Care Act places substantial responsibility on local authorities to ensure a vibrant and responsive marketplace that focuses on meeting people’s needs. This ensures wellbeing and the delivery of quality, innovative services – as well as value for money.
Evidence shows that people with personal budgets are more likely to report better outcomes if they find the process easy. The Dynamic Purchasing system enables anyone to quickly and easily describe an individual’s care and support needs and agreed outcomes via a web-based system. This could be the individual themselves with care and support needs, a family carer, a social worker, or third-party broker.
They’re then able to submit this to multiple providers simultaneously who are invited to respond with a proposal and indicative costs within a defined timescale. All interested providers can then review the request and provide a quotation which the user can then accept and pay for online. This encourages more tailored and competitively priced responses from providers as they compete to fulfill the request. It can also help to cut down on the often laborious and time-consuming process for setting up new tailored care packages where local authorities rely on teams of people contacting providers to evaluate who has availability.
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Key benefits
For local authorities
- Enables users to send ‘service requests’ simultaneously to self-selected providers, saving time chasing placements and resource across the process.
- Drives competition between providers on quality of outcomes and wellbeing-focused services, as well as innovation and price
- Algorithms can automatically rank responses based on agreed criteria
- By eliminating the time-consuming manual processes, resources can be reallocated
- The process is much quicker and easier, reducing bed blocking or emergency care whilst a new care package is set up
- Integration with Mosaic enables frameworks to be set up, which could trigger pre-populated support packages ready to be distributed to appropriate providers, further streamlining the process
For individuals
- Ability to be used by an individual with care and support needs, including those who self-fund, or someone working on their behalf
- Works for direct payments, managed budgets and individual service funds (ISFs)
- The person with care and support needs can be involved throughout the process, commissioning in a co-produced way
- Ideal for bespoke and complex packages as the user can provide a good level of detail about the needs of the person needing the care and support – plus the care package is put in place more quickly
For providers
- Providers can receive requests for care services and respond in a very efficient way, reducing administration tasks and ensuring they only receive relevant requests that they can accommodate or service
- Quotations can be accepted online
- Simplifies processes and administrative tasks
- Requests for availability and communication can all be channelled through the portal
- All providers are fairly approached to offer services