DHSC:ASC:Evaluation of the Better Care Fund

The Better Care Fund externally commissioned support programme supports Local Systems to deliver their BCF plans by providing expert support to areas integrating health, social care and wider services, to enable more people to live well and independently at home. As well as being important to the delivery of the wider BCF programme, this also supports good practice approaches to hospital discharge and recovery services, while helping to release hospital bed capacity. <br/>Key to the success of the BCF external support programme and evidencing its impact is separately commissioning an independent, external evaluation to run alongside delivery of support. <br/>The critical output from the independent evaluation is to build an evidence base to underpin the BCF external support programme and identify which aspects are working well and where improvement is needed so that the Department of Health and Social Care (‘the Authority’) can take appropriate action.<br/>At a high level, the main aims of the evaluation are to support the BCF team and partner organisations to:<br/>• Examine the effectiveness of the support programme’s delivery (identifying which parts of the support programme work and which ones do not) to gain a better understanding of the impact it has<br/>• Find out and showEvaluate how the core support programme is working and wherever possible, to help the core provider to clearly demonstrate the impact of external support in terms of measurable (including quantitative where feasible) and more intangible, qualitative benefits. This could potentially include proxy measures to show quantitative benefits that may be linked to showing where value for money has been delivered. <br/>• Bring about continuous improvement in the design and delivery of a range of support offered to local systems (including interventions that have the potential to reduce health and care inequalities) <br/>• Understand how the Authority can inform potential policy developments linked to external support. <br/>• Support and enable collaboration between partners across health, social care and housing.<br/>• Capture and feedback evaluation findings at the end of every quarter and throughout the duration of the contract (with initial findings to be provided at the end of the first quarter of evaluation delivery). <br/>• Share good practice across systems. This could include adding rigour and an improved evidence base to outputs of the support programme that have been proven to work by the evaluation. Outputs may include case studies, toolkits, and how to guides.<br/>• Lead work with the Authority to identify robust data collection processes that the Authority will require the core provider(s) of support services to put in place to support and enable independent evaluation in an iterative way that helps to demonstrate the effectiveness and impact of support. Additional information: Indicative Timelines contract start November 2023 for a period of 2 years