Travel-related costs of population dispersion in the provision of domiciliary care to the elderly: a case study in English Local Authorities

Abstract

The aim of this research has been to make a contribution to deliberations concerning the relative costs of provision of domiciliary services for the elderly in local authorities in England and the implications for funding. The main services considered have been day-centre services and home-care services, and the particular cost areas investigated have been travel-related costs as associated with distances travelled by day-centre vehicles and care workers and with worker travelling hours. These costs are influenced by the population settlement and dispersion characteristics of the areas served and funding mechanisms are needed (and are in place) to compensate service providers. However, current mechanisms have been widely criticized and the research reported here reaches conclusions about whether such criticisms are justified and how improvements might be brought about. The methods used have involved detailed operational modelling of the selected services in a sample of local authority areas and the generalization of the findings to England as a whole.

Household composition and the dynamics of community-based social care in England

“…Therefore, I used the percentage of beneficiaries of pension credit in receipt of the guarantee-credit element only as the data are available for the whole period under study – this element of the pension credit benefit is a top-up amount for people on low incomes (Age UK, 2016). I estimated the average percentages for the four quarters in each year.Rurality: social care services in rural areas are affected by sparcity (Asthana et al ., 2003) and higher costs (Hindle et al ., 2009) compared to more urban locations. Therefore, I controlled for the degree of rurality of the local authority as this may influence the relative prevalence of the sources of care services.…”

“…Rurality: social care services in rural areas are affected by sparcity (Asthana et al ., 2003) and higher costs (Hindle et al ., 2009) compared to more urban locations. Therefore, I controlled for the degree of rurality of the local authority as this may influence the relative prevalence of the sources of care services.…”

Plas'O'Soins: An Interactive ICT Platform to Support Care Planning and Coordination within Home-Based Care

“…Main researches in the field of home health care, concerning routing and scheduling problems which are an instance of VRP problems, started around 2000 with, for example, the works of Hindle et al [19,20] concerning resource allocation and travel cost approximations.…”

An optimization and simulation method for the home service assignment, routing, and scheduling problem with stochastic travel time, service time, and cancellation

“…Also, and considering that the H-SARA problem is closely related to the vehicle routing problem (VRP), Toth and Vigo (2014) present many variants of the VRP and the most efficient solution methods to tackle them. Concretely in the routing and scheduling of home services, most solution methods rely on metaheuristics (Akjiratikarl et al, 2007;Braekers et al, 2016;Mankowska et al, 2014), heuristics and approximation algorithms (Eveborn et al, 2006;Hindle et al, 2009), and few exact optimization techniques (Rasmussen et al, 2012). Despite that real-world operations are subject to uncertainty, most articles consider static information.…”