What is the relationship between length of stay, admission rates and occupancy levels in intensive home care and residential care on the introduction of a new strategy that invests in intensive home care as an alternative to residential care?
The assumptions underlying the model might be:
a) There are 1,000 older people in a population, with 120 of these in residential care;
b) People in residential care stay on average 3 years at the outset of the simulation;
c) There are two streams within the residential care sector:
- Stream one containing 84 (70% of residents) who are deemed to have had no alternative to a long term residential care admission;
- Stream two (30% of residents) for whom the first year of admission could have been substituted for intensive home care.
d) The simulation runs over 5 years - at the end of the first year additional intensive home care capacity is created to support the alternative route;
e) Weekly unit costs of £400 for residential care and £150 for intensive home care are used, but can be varied.
The model enables a clearer appreciation of the scale of impact as well as the time over which such an impact will be expected.
Overall costs of the strategy can also be estimated. Perhaps most importantly, however, is the insight that this simple model provides
into the affect of this shift of policy on the key indicator of rates of admission to care homes - whilst making an initial impact, over time
it reverts to previous levels! You might want to consider what alternative assumptions or scenarios would modify this outcome.
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