Market shaping toolkit: supporting local authority and SME care provider innovation and collaboration

The Market Shaping Toolkit supports both smaller care providers and local authorities to engage in market shaping and develop innovative practice to meet local needs together.

This toolkit has been designed to highlight good practice around the country in the way that local authorities and smaller care and support providers collaborate and provide innovative services. It offers a series of checklists and materials to encourage good quality market shaping activities.

• For local authorities, the toolkit will give some new ideas and suggestions about who to engage with, why and how, in local care markets.
• For providers, the toolkit offers a stimulus and encouragement to ask local authorities ‘Why are we not doing this?’

The toolkit has five distinct sections and an annotated bibliography which provides you with quick and easy links to further useful information. Some of the sections will be more useful to providers and some to local authorities and the toolkit is colour coded to help make this clear.

Tool One: A guide to care provider business
Tool Two: What is a market position statement and why is it important to providers?
Tool Three: Fostering innovation in care and support
Tool Four: Good practice for engagement with small and medium enterprises (SMEs)
Tool Five: A checklist for SME procurement

The Department of Health, the Local Government Association (LGA) and the Association of Directors of Adult Social Services (ADASS) commissioned the Institute of Public Care (IPC) at Oxford Brookes University to develop the toolkit, working in collaboration with the Care Provider Alliance, local authority commissioners, the United Kingdom Homecare Association (UKHCA), Care England and others, to develop this toolkit to support implementation of the Care Act.