ISER’s Professor Steve Pudney will be among the experts calling for more data on adult social care at the 2013 Conference of the Royal Statistical Society Statistics User Forum in London on 29 January.
The recent Dilnot Commission highlighted the lack of robust statistics to inform the urgently needed reform of funding of adult social care in England. The Royal Statistical Society conference will bring together policy analysts and data producers together with bodies concerned with the funding of social care to explore the inadequacy of existing statistics to analyse adult social care service availability, utilisation and costs.
Speakers will include Professor Steve Pudney from ISER and Professor Ruth Hancock from the University of East Anglia, currently working on Disability and care needs in the older population: disability benefits, social care and well-being, an 18 month project funded by the Economic and Social Research Council, which aims to provide robust, independent empirical evidence to sharpen policy judgements on reform of care services and disability benefits for older disabled people.
Using advanced statistical methods, the research team’s objectives are to:
- understand the impacts of public support including the effect of disability on wellbeing; whether care services and disability benefits have a significant alleviating effect; the effects of cash benefits compared with care services
- assess the responsiveness of public support to changes in older people’s care needs including examining the existence and consequences of any delays between the onset or increase in severity of disability and the receipt of benefit or services
- provide evidence on the likely impacts of potential policy reforms; seeing if there is a strong case for a change in the balance of cash benefits and care services within the system of support for older disabled people in terms of improvements in their wellbeing and in use of public resources
- assess the role of different configurations of disability within the households of older people; looking at couples where one or both have a disability and how that relates to the receipt of benefits/care services
The team expects to make a significant contribution to the body of objective and independent evidence on the likely impacts of reform of care services and disability benefits for older disabled people. Ultimately they expect this to improve the public debate and sharpen policy judgments in this area.