28 November 2024
The Minister of State for Care, Stephen Kinnock, announced a £22.6 million boost to the Accelerating Reform Fund (ARF) at the National Children and Adult Services Conference (NCASC) this afternoon.
The Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC)’s ARF aims to boost the quality and accessibility of adult social care by supporting innovation and scaling, and improving care and support for unpaid carers.
With a wealth of trusted expertise in working collaboratively to help local areas transform care, SCIE has been appointed by DHSC to provide hands-on support to local areas to identify barriers and enablers, share key learnings and best practice, and support innovation through local partnerships and project development.
Many of the ARF projects have the potential to drive productivity through early-support schemes and preventative systems, using digital tools to innovate in hospital discharge, carer-identification, and support for unpaid carers.
Kathryn Smith, Chief Executive at SCIE, said:
SCIE is proud to have been appointed to provide hands-on support to local areas for the ARF. We’re helping to identify issues and challenges and ensuring local authorities benefit from valuable shared learnings, peer support, and expert insights. This is the first ever such fund for social care innovation, so it’s incredibly important that we gather evidence from both success and failure on how to successfully tackle the barriers to scaling innovation, for the most effective future of social care.
Around 70% of projects have an element of supporting unpaid carers who, sadly, often do not get the recognition or support they deserve. Many of the projects also have the potential to drive productivity benefits through early-support schemes and preventative systems such as hospital discharge that look to embed new technologies.
We’re excited about the opportunities offered by the ARF. Learnings will be critical to laying the groundwork for a future social care service – one that better meets the needs people who draw on care, their family carers, and local communities. As the Minister of State for Care, Stephen Kinnock, said in his speech: ‘The time for progress is now.’ Innovation offers us a way forward, creating new possibilities for offering early support and enabling independence.
Kathryn Smith
Chief Executive of the Social Care Institute for Excellence (SCIE)
Notes to editors
The Social Care Institute for Excellence (SCIE) improves the lives of people of all ages by co-producing, sharing, and supporting the use of the best available knowledge and evidence about what works in practice. We are a leading social care improvement independent charity working with organisations that support adults, families and children across the UK. We also work closely with related services such as health care and housing. We improve the quality of care and support services for adults and children by:
- Identifying and sharing knowledge about what works and what’s new.
- Supporting people who plan, commission, deliver and use services to put that knowledge into practice.
- Informing, influencing and inspiring the direction of future practice and policy.
Our mission is to support best practice, shape policy and raise awareness of the importance of social care, working together. With the government’s ambition of reducing consultancy bills, SCIE can serve as the not-for-profit partner of government, working collaboratively to identify and implement improvements.
If you have any questions regarding this submission, please do not hesitate to contact media@scie.org.uk