Higher self-funder intakes have driven a £100 rise in weekly care home fees over the last two years.

Analysis collated by care home market analysts, Carterwood shows weekly care home fees rose by £100 from £895 in Q1 2021 to £981 in Q3 2022 due to higher self-funding rates to offset staffing, utilities and inflationary cost pressures.

Carterwood’s newly launched Collab online trading platforms also revealed self-funders’ share of the overall funding mix rose from 37% to 40% between Q1 2021 and Q3 2023 as providers’ offset modest increases in local authority fee rates.

Average occupancy rose from 78.4% in Q1 2021 to 84.2% in Q3 2022, still below pre-pandemic levels but with income levels boosted by rising weekly fees and self-funded referrals.

The platform data also revealed agency costs doubled from £222 per bed to £445 due to staffing challenges.

Announcing the launch of the Collab trading platform, Tom Hartley, managing director of Carterwood, said: “I’m so pleased to finally be able to share that Carterwood Collab is now live, a landmark for data collaboration within the elderly care home sector. This aggregated and anonymised data will help improve decision-making across the sector, powering market analysis and benchmarking with real trading data.

“Part of what makes Carterwood unique is our ability to reinvent how data can be accessed and used to inform decision-making. A huge thank you to our founding contributors, without whom this would not be possible. Working in collaboration with our clients to create this new platform has been such a fantastic experience.”

Professor Vic Rayner OBE, chief executive officer for National Care Forum, added: “Access to accurate and up-to-date data is a hugely powerful tool. It is very exciting, therefore, to see the launch of Collab, powered by Carterwood. Collab represents a really valuable contribution to the whole ability of social care providers to make sensible decisions about the development of new services that will meet community needs. By facilitating the sector to work together on this project, Collab shows that we really can be stronger together.”

For more information about Carterwood Collab and to book a demo visit www.carterwood.co.uk/analytics-collab/ or email [email protected]