Issue - meetings

Care For Medway: Preliminary Options to Build and Operate a Care Home

Meeting: 11/02/2025 - Cabinet (Item 5)

5 Care For Medway: Preliminary Options to Build and Operate a Care Home pdf icon PDF 452 KB

Additional documents:

Minutes:

Background:

 

The report provided the Cabinet with a preliminary analysis of the need for more capacity in Medway’s care home market and recommended that further, specialist analysis be undertaken to fully understand the potential costs and benefits of: designing, commissioning, and building of a care home; and, operating model options, including ongoing maintenance and resourcing.

 

Provision had been made available for this in the 2024-2025 budget. The report proposed to invest to develop a Care for Medway business case, as originally detailed in the Financial Improvement and Transformation (FIT) Plan published in April 2024.

 

At the Corporate Landlord Board on 31 October 2024, concerns had been raised around investing the full sum to evaluate if the project was viable or not. It was established the full amount would not be required in full immediately and that a proportion of the budget could be used in the first instance. This report had previously been considered at the Corporate Landlord Board on 12 December 2024, where the recommendations had been supported.  

 

The report had also previously been considered by the Health and Adult Social Care Overview and Scrutiny Committee on 16 January 2025 and its comments were set out in section 7 of the report.

 

The Cabinet expressed support for Option 2 which was to design and build on existing Council-owned land as set out in sections 5.9-5.14 of the report.

 

 

Decision

number:

 

Decision:

 

 

The Cabinet noted the comments of the Health and Adult Social Care Overview Committee, as set out in section 7 of the report.

6/2025

The Cabinet noted the report, reviewed the options, and agreed to proceed with commissioning an in-depth analysis of a business case.

Reasons:

This options paper presented potential ways forward for the Council to progress with its ambitions to provide a Council-owned and operated care home for Medway residential and nursing dementia service users.

The proposed specification for a care home also included provisions for assessment beds and reablement, which would increase our capacity and reduce waiting times for clients.  The option of using a small number of beds for self-funding clients would also be considered to support financial viability.

It is noted, based on this preliminary analysis, that this project would be unlikely to deliver financial savings in the short- to medium-term. However, it would increase the capacity of high-quality care home provision within Medway. Furthermore, the long-term forecast need for residential and nursing dementia care in Medway indicated that demand for such provision was likely to increase significantly.

Building and operating a care home represented a significant long-term investment and repayment for the Council, and expert and robust scrutiny was necessary. It was proposed to engage specialist consultants to examine the feasibility and potential business case for a care home, delivering the operating costs analysis at the end of Q1 2025/2026, and following the decision to progress to building design having been agreed, this would be delivered in Q4 2025/2026.