Medway Council

Medway is experiencing growing demand for adult social care alongside significant financial pressures and increasing complexity of need. Adult Social Care continues to represent one of the council's largest areas of expenditure, with overspends driven by rising demand, inflationary pressures and increasing numbers of people requiring specialist support.

Alongside these pressures, Medway has identified several strategic priorities including improving prevention, supporting independence, strengthening provider quality and developing a more sustainable care market. Recent evidence highlights a number of recurring challenges: growing demand for supported living services; increasing complexity of mental health and learning disability provision; hospital discharge pressures; shortages of specialist residential and nursing provision; rising supported living costs; variation in provider quality; brokerage pressures when sourcing complex packages; and the need for stronger market sustainability.

The recent CQC Local Authority Assessment also identified areas requiring improvement, including consistency of assessments, reviews, safeguarding practice and access to appropriate services for some people.

Across Medway's published strategies and CQC findings, a recurring theme is the growing importance of provider confidence rather than simply provider capacity. As demand becomes more complex, commissioners increasingly need providers who can evidence governance, resilience and readiness, enabling more informed commissioning and brokerage decisions.

• •Medway's challenge is not provider numbers. It is confidence in provider capability.
• •The challenge is not solely whether providers exist. It is whether commissioners have sufficient confidence in provider capability, quality and readiness when responding to increasingly complex demand.
• •Having capacity is no longer enough if commissioners cannot easily understand where that capability exists or how quickly it can be mobilised.
• •For providers, this reinforces the importance of demonstrating commissioning readiness through clear evidence of governance, operational capability, workforce resilience and service quality.

Commissioners are likely to value providers who can demonstrate operational resilience, strong governance arrangements, evidence of quality improvement, ability to support complex care packages, flexible and responsive service delivery, partnership working across health and social care, capacity to support timely hospital discharge, and readiness to evidence capability before opportunities arise.

How prepared is your organisation for Medway's future commissioning priorities?

• Can we mobilise urgent care packages within agreed timescales?
• Can we evidence positive outcomes for people using our services?
• Do we have specialist expertise in learning disabilities, autism or mental health?
• Can we demonstrate experience supporting hospital discharge?
• Do we regularly monitor independence, wellbeing and community outcomes?
• Can we evidence strong governance and continuous quality improvement?
• Do we have workforce plans that demonstrate resilience and continuity?
• Could a commissioner easily understand our capability from our website and supporting information?
• Do we have anonymised case studies that demonstrate successful delivery of complex care?
• Are we able to clearly explain what makes our organisation different from other providers?

This Local Authority Intelligence publication has been produced by Odelia Group through independent analysis of publicly available evidence, including Adult Social Care strategies, Market Position Statements, commissioning information, CQC assessments, procurement publications and related sector intelligence.

Its purpose is to translate published evidence into practical market intelligence that supports providers, commissioners and sector partners in better understanding local adult social care markets.

This publication represents Odelia Group's independent analysis and should not be interpreted as representing the views of Medway Council or as procurement advice.