Defining Complex Cases in our Independent Living Services

The British Red Cross has been delivering health and social care services for over 70 years,working closely with our partners to help people move more swiftly and safely though the care system. Our range of services provide a person-centred approach to ensure all the practical and emotional needs of a person are met, to help them get back on their feet and live independently. We receive referrals for support from:

• Our statutory health and social care partners such as hospitals, primary care trusts and local authorities;
• Third sector organisations and community groups;
• The people needing the support themselves or their family or friends.

Further information on our services is included in Appendix 1, this outlines our service models and their intended outcomes.

Our service evaluations and feedback from our operational teams identify inappropriate referrals and being asked to support people with what they refer to as complex needs as recurring themes. Services are developing their own practices in response to these issues and there is no universal definition across our services as to what makes a case complex. This makes it difficult for our service monitoring and evaluation to identify the impact of complex cases on our service delivery or the achievement of our intended outcomes, and therefore limits the extent to which this can inform our service development and improvement.

We are looking for an independent contractor to help us to better understand the issues of complexity, it's impact on our work and how we can better identify and record this.

For more details, please see the attached Invitation to Tender document.