- Title or Description
- Complex Home Care
- FOI Number
- 2024271
- Date Received
- 01/03/2024
- Type of Request
- FOI
- Request or Question
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Under the Freedom of Information Act, I would like to request the following information regarding complex home care packages for adults aged 18+, except for questions 1, 2, 4 and 7 where information is required for both adults aged 18+ and children aged 0-18 years old. For clarity, adults and children receiving complex care have substantial and ongoing healthcare needs, which require additional support to manage their symptoms. These can be the result of chronic illness, disabilities or following hospital treatment. Home care refers to packages of care delivered in the individuals own homes (not in care homes or residential facilities). Please provide data for the following financial years: 2019/20, 2020/21, 2021/22, 2022/23 and 2023/24 (projected) except questions 5 and 6 which require a current snapshot (instead of projections for 2023/24), and question 7 which only requires data for 2022/23. If any data for 2022/23 is not available, please provide budgeted figures for the year or the latest snapshot data that is available. Where possible, please kindly include responses on the attached spreadsheet.
1. Please could you supply the name, email address and telephone number of the commissioner with responsibility for packages of complex home care for (a) adults aged 18+ and (b) children aged 0-18 years old.
2. Please provide the number of people in receipt of complex home care packages (all active packages during the year including those which started prior) for (a) adults aged 18+ and (b) children aged 0-18 years old.
3. Please provide the total number of complex home care hours delivered for adults aged 18+.
4. Please provide the total gross expenditure on complex home care packages during the year for (a) adults aged 18+ and (b) children aged 0-18 years old.
5. Please provide the lowest, mean and highest hourly rate for complex home care packages for adults aged 18+ for 2019/20 to 2022/23 as well as a current snapshot.
6. Please provide the lowest, mean and highest weekly fee for complex home care packages for adults aged 18+ for 2019/20 to 2022/23 as well as a current snapshot.
7. Please provide a list of the 10 providers who received the greatest amount of funding for complex home care packages. Please provide data for the last financial year 2022/23 for (a) adults aged 18+ and (b) children aged 0-18 years old. I. For each provider, please provide the number of complex home care packages in 2022/23 (all active packages during the year including those which started prior). ii. For each provider, please provide total expenditure in 2022/23 related to complex home care. - Response
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Unfortunately Scottish Borders Council cannot answer the questions requested as the Council does not categorise homecare as complex or non-complex.
The Council log the number of weekly hours, provider etc, but not the nature of the care provided, as the number of hours in a package does not always equate to the complexity.
The Council record the overall number of people who received homecare packages in those years, however as explained above, the council are unable to break it down any further, without exceeding the 600 cost of compliance of an information request. It would take the Council officers weeks to manually trawl through individual records to answer each question for the years requested.
Scottish Borders Council has considered your request and concluded that the cost of complying with it would be more than 600. Under S12 (1) of FOISA 2002 Scottish Borders Council is not obliged to comply with a request that is estimated to exceed this cost. Therefore, we are refusing your request.
Regarding Q1, The Council does not have a commissioner specifically for Special Needs Groups it is purchased ad hoc depending on need and would be in discussion with managers within Social Work Services and ultimately the Chief Social Work Officer agreeing this.
For Learning Disability and Mental Health the commissioner is Simon Burt, General Manager Mental Health and Learning Disability Services, Details provided to requester
We appreciate that this will be disappointing to you. We would be pleased to discuss whether your request could be changed, to bring down the cost of providing the information and allow us to respond.
Please note that a manual scrutiny of individual records would still be required for complex needs regardless of the time period requested and may still exceed the cost of complying with your request. Please contact the Information Management Team to discuss options.
