The Care Outcomes Lab

The need across the UK for adult social care services is rising each year, and total spending for these services is also rising. In 2024/2025, UK central government and local communities spent £24.8 billion on services including supported living, care homes, direct payments, home care, and other community-based care.¹

At the same time, local authorities are increasingly recognising that in order to return value for this spend to communities, social care programs need to focus on delivering meaningful health and wellbeing outcomes – the personal and community-level changes that care is intended to produce – rather than solely striving for efficiency and demand reduction. 

Commissioners, policy-makers and practitioners around the world are experimenting with how to implement person-centred, strengths-based and outcomes focused care services in local operational contexts. These experiments include social impact financing, outcomes-based contracting, co-commissioning with service users, and more. Yet many local authorities recognise the daunting distance to cross between the operational practices and infrastructure of today and the person-centred, strengths-based, outcomes-focused services they strive to deliver in the future.  It is this gap, between aspirations for the wellbeing outcomes of communities, and the operational realities of funding pressures, ill-fitting technology platforms, disinvested workforces, and complex policy and regulatory landscapes, where the Care Outcomes Lab hopes to make a contribution.