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Financial Resilience

Our current fee rates for care homes are set out in our Market Sustainability Plan.

Many of our providers operate on tight margins and need high occupancy levels to ensure financial viability.

Current challenges around the cost of living and the subsequent impact on workforce are major concerns for Bexley providers. Recruitment and retention issues are leading to high turnover and vacancy rates. Providers are also communicating concerns around rising costs of heating, utilities, and insurance costs, leading to increased risk of market exit and lack of financial resilience particularly for smaller providers (as evidenced by two recent home closures).

The Fair Cost of Care exercise, whilst imperfect in terms of methodology, has provided detailed insights to the costs faced by our providers and will enable us to work with individual providers to address their specific financial issues based on their own respective starting point.

Therefore, we do not take a blanket approach to fee rate adjustment, but in line with our long-standing flexible approach to supporting our providers take account of their individual circumstances. The extent to which each provider is reliant on private fee-payers is a factor in this and we recognise the need to make steps to address any over-reliance during the forthcoming period of adult social care reform.

Factors influencing the size of the self-funding population include general population ageing, the level of asset ownership among older people, and access to information and advice about the options available. We will continue to help our residents to avoid making decisions about long term care from a hospital bed, or from a point of crisis in the community.

Crisis intervention and preventative care, including day opportunities and respite care, may be a more appropriate option for some of our residents, thereby avoiding unnecessary admissions to care homes.

We welcome ideas from providers which support these preventative measures."