London Borough of Harrow

Councils carry out an assessment of anyone who appears to require care and support, regardless of their eligibility for state-funded care.  Councils often have a high number of assessment applications and there are significant variations between Councils in how assessments are conducted.

Many councils could benefit if they could enable certain individuals and their informal carers to conduct a digitally supported self-assessment so that Councils can focus their assessment resources on those individuals less able to do so, and those with more complex needs. This could:

– Save Councils money;
– Reduce assessment demand;
– Introduce suitable service users to self-help early in their interaction with care services;
– Enable non-Council care services and products to be readily presented to service users at the conclusion of the assessment process;

We will:
– Identify the scale of the opportunity to introduce a modern digitally supported self-assessment service and the requirements of Councils which might use such a service.
– Understand how a target group of potential service users (eg older people and their informal carers) would prefer to engage with a digitally supported self-assessment process.
– Research the availability of suitable modern technologies to enable digitally supported self-assessment to be delivered cost effectively.