Care Provider Forum: Frequently Asked Questions Edition 3

Care Provider Forum

Frequently Asked Questions

Edition 3

  1. How frequent are the provider forum meetings?

The forum meetings will take place bi-monthly, however due to the current piece of work – the next meeting will take place in October.

To register your attendance please use this link: If you would like to add anything to the agenda – please contact .

This meeting is scheduled to take place on Thursday 20th October from 1pm – 4.30pm with drinks available from 12.30pm.

  1. Achieving ‘outstanding’ requires investment for each small provider. What guarantee can you give us that you will pay an enhanced rate to support this?

There are no guarantees. The Council has not begun setting its budget for 2017+. However as mentioned at the forum meeting on 12th July, we are keen for the market to tell us how we should incentivise those providers who deliver excellent quality care of the citizens of Birmingham and what we should do with those providers that do not. There is a small working group established being led by Malik Khan to consider this.

  1. The introduction of Sproc.Net has made tendering of all packages ‘paper-based’ decreasing the power of personal relationships andrecommendations from social workers as well as word of mouth. Has your commissioning approved of this change?

Sproc-net is the focus of a small working group which will review our approach to ensure fairness and quality of the commissioning process.

Sproc.Net was implemented for older adult packages of care. Younger adult care is currently excluded because of an outstanding legal matter. One of the reasons for introducing Sproc.Net was specifically to remove the power of personal relationships as this was felt by providers to be unfair. Word of mouth is still a feature of the Sproc.Net system, with citizens and families being able to suggest preferred care providers.

  1. If a home is achieving good/excellent, how will the city council ensure that the incentivised payments are used on service delivery and service users? Punishing poor providers with lower pay doesn’t give them opportunity to improve.

Another small group of providers has been looking at the fair price of care. This group has suggested a range of margins. In addition, it may be one of the proposals that for providers entering into the new arrangements from 1st October 2017, an open book process will be in place.

The Council invests significant resources in working with providers who may be providing ‘poor’ care – through the contract management function as well as the learning and development service (tlds). Many providers are able to use the action-planning phase productively and improve their performance. It has been proposed, by providers, that the ultimate ‘punishment’ for poor providers is to be removed from the contract.

  1. If working towards only paying for good and excellent, care, how can this be afforded if demand stays the same?

As a result of greater integration with health and the new approach to adult social care in the city, it is anticipated that families and communities would be more involved with supporting individuals in need, thus reducing the demand on the service for residential care.

  1. Can you email the slides please, especially the future commissioning time table?

All of the slides and information from the provider forums is available at

  1. Direct payments are £10.96. Are there any plans to educate citizens that there will be a need for ‘top-ups’ in Domiciliary Care?

The council is required to provide citizens with a Personal Budget which is the amount of money that will be available to meet their eligible assessed needs. If a citizen has a direct payment and chooses to purchase services for example, domiciliary care, the personal budget will be costed on an initial £13 per hour rate. The only time that a citizen would be required to ‘top up’ the rate, would be if they chose services that were more expensive when other services could be purchased within the personal budget that has been set.

  1. Sproc.Net - When will Support Living packages ‘go live’?

Supported Living packages will go live from 1st October 2017.

  1. A large number of sproc-net packages come to nothing after provider has spent resources on risk assessment, etc. What mechanism exists for fair payment for time spent?

There are no existing mechanisms in place for paying providers to apply for business on Sproc.Net. If this situation occurs after winning a care package, it could be for a number of reasons. These include:

  • The family/citizen hasdecided that they do not want the carer as they have turned up late or unannounced for their assessment.
  • The attitude of the provider during their assessment sometimes leads to the family/citizen refusing to have them as a provider. This then reflects very badly on the provider and family/citizen want a different carer.
  • Following a fair charge review, the family/carer decides they no longer want care as they do not want to pay a contribution.
  1. Will a system of quality assurance be introduced for home care or is just for nursing homes?

The Council has a quality assurance toolkit in place for Home Care. The live quality dashboard for care homes and home care can be found at .

  1. Will BCC provide support for training/development and CPD for frontline management to enable our services to be enhanced which will lead to improved quality?

The City Council provides a range of training resources for social care staff through the Learning & Development Centre ensuring frontline managers have the right training & support in a provider’s responsibility. Recruiting, retaining, developing & supporting good frontline managers is a key factor in delivering quality care -

  1. Can all new businessopportunities be made available to all providers to?

The working group reviewing the use of the dynamic purchasing offer will consider this as part of their discussions.

  1. Can providers be paid to manage direct payments for citizens?

Direct payments are paid to service users for them to pay directly for services which meet their own care and support needs. The arrangements you might be thinking of are called Individual Service Funds.

  1. Homecare self-assessment. Reductions of care packages for people with learning disabilities/dementia can take a long time to achieve. Can this be recognised in the scoring matrix?

We will consider this when the Self-Assessment Questionnaire is reviewed.

  1. Will the home care quality self-assessment be reviewed? Currently elements of this assessment penalises providers who operate in an open and transparent manner.

The Self-Assessment Questionnaire is constantly reviewed. Providers and citizens are consulted as part of this review process before agreement is reached.

  1. Can training be provided to all registered markets/management teams which identifies the outcomes needed to drive up standards for CQC?

This is a question for CQC. Here is a link to the CQC website:

  1. SAQ assessment process. We are aware that the review is on hold at present but will we have an opportunity to input into review before changes are implemented?

When the SAQ is reviewed, care providers and citizens will be consulted with before it is agreed.

  1. Need to establish a set of ground rules to stop the negativity from some providers that keep coming to each meeting. This is stopping the approach to move forward.

There are now an agreed set of engagement rules and behaviours that have been agreed. These can be found at:

  1. The time scales for safeguarding’s raised to get an allocated social worker to investigate and speak to all parties involved is not acceptable. This currently is approximately four weeks by which time the citizens are vague and have forgotten information. Can this be reduced?

The timescales for completing the various stages of the safeguarding process that BCC is currently working to, from the point of referral, are as follows:

  • Concern (i.e. referral) – 24 hours
  • Decision making – 5 days
  • Enquiry (previously investigation & case conference) – 38 days
  • Review – 122 days

However, the complexity of the concerns, the risks and the needs of the vulnerable person are going to vary from safeguarding case to safeguarding case. These factors will determine the speed of the response and the time it takes to conclude the enquiry.

If you are concerned about the length of time it is taking to respond to a safeguarding concern then please bring this to the attention of the responsible social work team.

  1. Is the City Council promoting independent budgets for all service users?

The Care and Support Statutory Guidance issued under the Care Act 2014 requires the Council to provide a personal budget allocation following a social care and support needs assessment.

This allocation is to pay for the provision of care and support to meet an adult’s eligible care needs. The personal budget can be taken either as a direct payment for the purchase of services or employment of personal assistants or care is arranged by the local authority to meet the agreed care and support. The Council is promoting the use of direct payments during the assessment and support planning process.

  1. Can the time scales be reduced for citizens who are waiting for an allocated social worker? Urgent cases in particular take too long and this affects quality.

This is not an ideal situation, the introduction of the customer journey timescales for the allocation of a Social Worker/Social Care Facilitator have been reduced over the last 12months. However, there are some service areas that are currently under pressure, i.e. Learning Disabilities. Action is being taken to address this.

In the other service areas most referrals for assessment, regardless of priority, are allocated within four weeks and cases identified as higher priority are responded to much sooner than that. If you feel a referral needs to be prioritized for allocation please bring this to attention of the responsible team.

  1. Can the City council offer any support to providers looking to build care establishments in either prosperous or disadvantaged areas of the City?

Birmingham has a suite of Market Position Statements (MPS), covering the social care markets for older adults, learning disability, physical disability and for housing in later life. These are written as guides for providers, and contain demographic information and predictions, along with the current usage and capacity of each care sector and the gaps in the market. A new set of Market Position Statements are currently in development.

They can be found at the following website:

The Place Directorate Employment Support Team has employment support initiatives that give financial support to firms that take on residents of Birmingham who have been unemployed for some time. For further information please contact the Employment Support Team who will able to give you further information on these initiatives. The contact for the team is: Bal Uppal, Employment & Skills Officer who is on email

  1. Is there potential for providers to undertake joint training with ASP colleagues re: their assessment process?

It would be certainly be useful to explore how we can engender a better understanding of the ASP assessment process and the information needed by our provider colleagues. We will have to give further thought as to the best way of achieving this.

  1. What are the developments around Adam’s ‘direct payment’ portal?

adam are in the process of developing adam LIFE, a new online platform, which looks to put citizens in control

•Request the care: Users can tell providers specifically what they are looking for

•Receive a range of offers: Providers respond by putting forward their offer, which can easily be compared to other provider offers

•Choose, use and rate: Choose the provider, manage the relationship and provide feedback

The target audience for this new online platform is Direct Payment recipients and self-funders.

Whilst the Council has taken an interest in this development (Birmingham City Council like many other Local Authorities is interested to see whether interactive, online, electronic market places can have a positive impact on Direct Payment recipients and self-funders who are looking to commission care and support) the development of adam LIFE is not linked to the Council and there is no contract between adam and the Council in this regard.

adam are looking to launch their adam LIFE product in November 2016 and the Council will watch with interest, as with any other market development, as to how this platform grows and develops. The first care category available for purchase via adam LIFE will be Home Support.

adam are in the process of developing a website ( and enquiries can be directed to adam at

Sub Group specific points raised:

Quality Care

  1. Will the SAQ questions be appropriate to all providers?

The SAQ questions will be specific to each category of care.

  1. Is there a discussion with the training provider? This, asked in light of standardisation of the quality of care.

The Council will work with The Learning and Development Service to ensure that training opportunities are in line with quality of care requirements and expectations.

  1. Quality – Outstanding. Think it is fairer to say limited and controlled use of agency staff (in an emergency sometimes agency staff are good); Staff play an important part in service delivery. It is more about ensuring use of quality agency staff.
  2. To improve quality and reduce costs. Training cost – reduce by exchanging expertise e.g.:-
  3. Provider 1 – provide a day of PCP training to provide 2 staff.
  4. Provider 2 – Moving and handling training day to provider 1 staff (list of who can offer what).
  5. Support for struggling providers and being linked to a provider who has good systems who can support them to improve the quality of care.

The Learning and Development Service operate a ‘buddying’ system to support managers requiring additional support. Further support to struggling providers can be met by care providers themselves.

Fair Price of Care

  1. Has Birmingham City Council looked at the history of SprocNet by Essex and West Sussex?

When building SProc.Net, the Council did look at Essex but not West Sussex.

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