Adult Social Care Activity and Finance Report, England - 2020-21

The local authority has a legal responsibility to review the needs of an individual, which may result in a change in care plan for an individual to make sure that the adult’s needs continue to be met and they can achieve their desired outcomes. The person themselves also has the right to request a review of their care and support plan, if they wish.

Please Note: previously, local authorities reported a variety of data quality issues relating to their reviews data, for example, allocation between planned/unplanned reviews, reviews recorded as assessments or updates and so not captured as reviews. This should be considered when examining the data relating to this area, and particularly when considering local and national trends.

In 2020-21, 58.4% of clients who had been in receipt of long-term support for more than a year were reviewed within the reporting period (268,435 clients reviewed out of 459,395 clients in long-term support for more than a year), down from 60.8% in 2019-20. A number of local authorities advised that due to the COVID-19 pandemic, there was a reduction in formal reviews taking place.

As can be seen in Figure 28, the proportion of clients being reviewed varied by region from 43.0% to 74.5%. The highest review rate can be seen in the North East region.

Source: SALT Collection, 2020-21, NHS Digital - See Table 50 in Reference Data Tables

Figure 29 shows the number of clients reviewed in the year receiving either a planned review, unplanned review or both carried out within the year. The total number of clients reviewed decreased by 19,610 from 2019-20.

Figure 29: Clients reviewed in the year by review type, 2020-21

Source: SALT Collection, 2020-21, NHS Digital - See Table 50 in Reference Data Tables

Data is also available on the number of reviews and their outcome. This information can be found in the data file which accompanies this report.