Moving forward | Strategic report
Delivering an integrated care and housing offer
As an experienced and dedicated care and support provider, we offer a range of practical services which enable people to continue to enjoy independent lives and provide peace of mind to their loved ones.
Building on decades of experience providing dedicated care and support, we’re passionate about ensuring we understand our customers’ needs so that we can continue to provide the best quality service.
With a committed team of care and support workers, who receive regular professional training, we’re committed to continually developing the way we do things, working hard to integrate our housing and care and support services to provide the best possible service as and when life changes for our customers.
Integrating care and housing services
We’ve made further progress following a thorough review of our accessibility offer, introducing an integrated aids and adaptations service and early phases of an invisible-by-design approach with our new build homes.
We continue to work hard to rollout the digitisation of our processes for colleagues across the organisation. This will ensure quicker access to data and the ability for information to be shared and actioned upon in a more agile way.
Although we’ve taken the difficult decision to exit from some key care and support services, particularly in the West Midlands, we remain committed to this part of the country and to delivering the best possible service to our customers and residents.
“We continue to work hard to integrate our housing and care offer in pursuit of delivering a more personalised services for our customers to ensure that when life changes for them, we’re able to respond and adjust in an agile way to provide the support they need.”
Working hard behind the scenes, we’ve professionalised the way we bid for new care and support contracts as we continue to focus on business streams and areas that align with our growth ambitions.
As a result, despite strong competition, we’re delighted to have recently been awarded two contracts with a combined income of approximately £1m a year to deliver support to people with learning disability and mental health needs in Birmingham. A proportion of this will be delivered in partnership with the charity MIND.
In depth
Why we care
You can see how and why we care in this video which summarises the variety of care and support services we provide to our customers. Longhurst Group colleagues and the people who receive these services who explain how we make a positive difference to their lives.
Integrating key services
Customers supported with assistive technology
Independent Living Service referrals
We’ve reorganised how our later living services are managed and transferred the oversight of our leasehold management services into our Care and Support division.
Planning and coordinating services to these homes alongside our traditional sheltered housing will help us optimise operational synergies and provide integrated access our assisted technology, independent living and care services as and when needed.
Assistive technology
Our Assistive Technology Team continues to install, monitor and test new products in this fast-moving sector and have supported approximately 1,600 customers this year to live independently and remain in the communities they wish to live.
Independent living
Our Independent Living Advice Service, which provides advice, information and support to our customers and their families and carers to help them address their needs and live independently in their homes, has also expanded following its launch last May, receiving 750 referrals up until the end of March.
Tenancy sustainment
The Tenancy Sustainment Service that we introduced last year has seen a reduction in the percentage of tenancies sustained to 89 percent following an increase in movement following the removal of restrictions during the Coronavirus pandemic. However, it remains a valued support to those that are referred and provides crucial support to customers struggling to maintain their tenancies.
Moving forward
Related KPIs
Looking to the future, the Older Persons Commissioning Strategy estimates that by 2036, the over 65 population will increase by 48 percent and the over 85 population by 110 percent.
The work we’re doing now to gain greater insight about our customers to inform a more integrated approach will help us prepare for these changing demographics and the challenges we’ll face as people develop more complex health and social care needs.
By gaining greater insight about our customers and communities, we’ll deliver more personalised services, including accommodation and technology that adapts to and supports their needs.
Further research is being undertaken as we review our Customer Insight strategy and our data to ensure we’re able to make informed decisions about aids and adaptations that may be required to make our homes as accessible as possible.
With the Government acknowledging importance of social care and introducing the Health and Social Care Levy in April 2022, we’re optimistic that the required resource will be invested to help the nation cope with the additional demands it already faces as well as prepare for the future.
It’s crucial that we remain proactive ourselves and we’re working hard to further professionalise care and support roles through more engaging recruitment campaigning and marketing, and by ensuring our employment offer is as generous as possible, this includes our commitment to paying the real living wage to our frontline care and support colleagues from April 2022.
“We’re working hard to further professionalise care and support roles through more engaging recruitment campaigning and marketing, and by ensuring our employment offer is as generous as possible.”
We continue to engage with local authorities and key contacts at Westminster and Whitehall to help influence policy around pay and conditions for paid carers. Through the Harry’s Pledge campaign that we’ve spearheaded we’ve seen multiple MPs engage with the aims set out and share our commitment to create parity of esteem for carers.
You can find more about our campaigning progress with Harry’s Pledge on on the Harry’s Pledge website, including a recent briefing event we hosted with key partners at the Houses of Parliament during Carers Week.
In depth
Harry’s Pledge
Emily Holzhausen OBE, Director of Policy and Public Affairs at Carers UK, talks about Harry's Pledge and why it's so important that organisations like Longhurst Group support the campaign.
© Longhurst Group Limited
Longhurst Group Ltd is a charitable housing association registered in England as a community benefit society (Reg. No. 8009) and registered with the Regulator of Social Housing (No. L4277).
Registered Office: 1 Crown Court, Crown Way, Rushden, Northamptonshire NN10 6BS. VAT Reg No. 326 0270 36. A member of the National Housing Federation.