Making the economic case for adult social care: the EconomicS of Social carE CompEndium (ESSENCE) project

Constrained social care resources mean that decision-makers must make difficult choices about how to allocate them to best effect. The EconomicS of Social carE CompEndium (ESSENCE) project aims to collate and build economic evidence on adult social care (including both cost and outcome data) and make it available to decision-makers, managers, practitioners and individuals who use or pay for services themselves. Searches for economic evidence were undertaken across a range of databases. The ESSENCE toolkit offers a comprehensive collection of relevant research and summarises it with individual case summaries and a searchable database. Seventeen case summaries and a database with 231 sources have been produced to date, published on the project website. Evidence is grouped into service categories, focussing primarily on interventions considered core to adult social care for which there are studies considered to be robust in terms of design, quality, consistency and setting. The toolkit also provides signposts to interventions where it is currently not possible to examine the economic case but which could be evaluated in future research.