Social Care Support Hours

26

10/01/2022

FOI

This Freedom of Information request is relating to social care support hours. We are submitting the following four questions to all local authorities in Scotland to gather an accurate picture of how COVID-19 has impacted the delivery of social care. We would like to know: 1. Since March 2020, how many clients have had their one-to-one support hours a) increased and b) reduced?2. Since March 2020, how many clients have had their shared support hours a) increased and b) reduced?

3. How many clients have had their hours reinstated to the levels received prior to the COVID-19 lockdown in March 2020?
4. How many clients have had their financial contributions decreased to reflect any changes to contracted hours?

1.
The number of individuals as at 01/03/2020 and still receiving care today are 793 people.
For those people over that period:
No. of people with increases only   - 251
No. of people with decreases only -    96
No. of people with both increases and decreases - 291
No. of people with no changes - 155
This is based on the total weekly hours entered in the care plan.

2. We are not aware of any way we can report on an increase or decrease in shared care hours. The Council is unable to extract this information from our reporting system therefore this would require a manual check through the system to obtain the answer for each individual case. This task would take a considerable amount of time to complete and would exceed the threshold of cost incurred in responding to an FOI request, and we therefore apply section 12 of FOISA.
The estimated time of dealing with your request would involve over 40 hours of officer time. To comply with your request an officer would be required to trawl through in excess of 250 service user case files to identify, extract and summarise the data. 250 x 10mins = 2,500/60 = 41.66hrs x £15 = £624.
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.

3. All clients receiving a care at home service by SB Cares that have had temporary adjustments to their care hours due to COVID 19 have had their support re-instated.

4. Individuals do not contribute financially to free personal care. Where a change in a support plan has increased or decreased for free personal care does not impact the individual.   Where a person chooses Self-directed Support, Option 1 – Direct Payment, there individual budget would be increased or decreased according to their assessed need.

Social Care Support Hours - Freedom of information requests