Person Shaped Support

 

Lesley Dixon is Chief Executive of PSS (Person Shaped Support) which has a long history of social care innovation and is one of the leading independent providers of Shared Lives services. PSS has just published a report on the outcomes and costs of its Shared Lives support, which includes powerful personal stories alongside data which should interest many people working in the sector. Lesley writes:

Social Impact Reporting is a big priority for us. At the end of each year, we make it our business to take a detailed look at what works, what difference our services make, what is cost-effective and ultimately whether we are doing any good for the people we work with.

We recently published our first Social Impact Report for Shared Lives and TRIO,  which looks at the fantastic achievements made by our Shared Lives schemes across the UK; in Merseyside, Wirral, Manchester, Wales and the Midlands. The report includes information on the people we work with, the pathway they follow when they come to the service,  the outcomes we support people to achieve (including case studies) and what our service-users think about the service. It outlines some cost-benefit analysis information, looking at the value of our Shared Lives projects when compared with other, costlier forms of care in the areas we work in, and also looks at some of the innovative work being done with our TRIO project in Wales, the hospital-to-home work we are trialling in some of the schemes, and our work with Shared Lives Plus on the My Shared Life tool.

Perhaps our biggest finding from this report is around the savings our scheme can make to the public sector. We found that Shared Lives is 51% cheaper than residential care and 35% cheaper than supported living. This means that on average, a Shared Lives Placement at PSS would represent an annual saving of £23,491 per person, compared to if they were to be placed in residential care, or an annual saving of £11,922 if they were placed in Supported Living.

Whilst there are some really good findings and inspiring case studies in the report, we know there is more we can do to keep getting better.  We plan to use the My Shared Life tool from Shared Lives Plus to help us manage impact on an ongoing basis, as opposed to a reflective report at the end of each year.  This will help us ‘course correct’ where we know that some of the things we are doing could be more effective or where they aren’t working.  We also really want to embed some measures which can help us demonstrate that what we are doing is high quality (such as some of the NICE Quality Standard measures), as well as some other tools which can help us establish baselines and demonstrate an emotional impact – such as people no longer feeling socially isolated or lonely.