Care funding shortfall leaves self-funders filling £1.3 billion gap

clock • 2 min read

Self-funding, or private-pay, care home residents are keeping the sector afloat according to the latest figures from healthcare market intelligence provider LaingBuisson.

The latest update to its Care Cost Benchmarks toolkit has found that the average fee per resident paid to care homes falls short of the real costs of service provision by more than £100 a week. Residents who pay from their own finances are filling a funding gap of £1.3 billion a year. Residential care homes in England for older people, which employ average levels of staff at average pay rates, currently need to charge fees of between £648 and £590 per week in order to generate a reasonable annual return on capital (set at 11% in the Care Cost Benchmarks model, a level appropriate for ...

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