Principle 18 of the European Pillar of Social Rights guarantees the right to good quality, affordable, long-term care services. However, as the 2021 Long-term Care in the EU Report[1] showed, there will be a substantial rise in the number of people in need of long-term care by 2050[2]. The EU expenditure on long-term care is thus one of the fastest-rising social expenditures. As a result, the quality and the sustainability of long-term care may suffer as the number of people in need and the expenditure rise.

One solution proposed would be moving towards user-centred funding models, where an amount of money is distributed directly to the individual with care and support needs. This type of funding model could contribute to improve the quality of long-term care by allowing beneficiaries to better address their individual needs. Examples of user-centred funding models are personal budgets. A personal budget is an amount of money provided by the public authorities to an individual, who has discretion over how to use it to cover their support needs. Developing personal budgets could improve the long-term care of many groups, including people with disabilities, older people, children, and people experiencing homelessness.

‘Towards user-centred funding models for long-term care’ (UNIC) presents several innovative solutions to support the transition to user-centred funding models. Firstly, it sets out to establish a framework to support that transition, through the preparation of reports featuring models of good practices linked to personal budgets. UNIC also published a roadmap with guidelines on overcoming challenges related to long-term care and the provision of support.

UNIC is also developing a toolkit[1] to help public authorities and service providers to build and implement personal budgets. The toolkit will contain several innovative solutions, including a quality monitoring tool that will allow public authorities to better monitor the quality of the service provided in a personal budget framework. A service delivery tool will help long-term care providers to design and deliver user-centred services. Finally, a compliance assurance tool will help public authorities to promote, engage and deliver personal budget systems. The service delivery tool is of particular interest, as it was designed to help service providers to deliver more effective person-centred services. The tool will look at different areas (citizenship, community life, legal frameworks) and allow service providers to identify areas for improvement in their work.

UNIC is a three-year project running between 2020 and 2023. At the halfway point, UNIC has delivered a good practices report, a European roadmap for user-centred funding for long-term care, and a first version of the toolkit (currently being piloted in Flanders).

A formal external evaluation will take place after the project is completed. The results will feed into the follow-up projects now being discussed. 

The DFI, as an EASPD member, has undertaken an internal evaluation. Every six months, it distributes a questionnaire to the project partners on their experiences and the quality of the project. The insights yielded enabled UNIC to adjust its initially over-ambitious timeline to a more achievable timeframe.   

While a pilot project is ongoing in Flanders, the project was developed so as to be transferrable across the EU. To that end, initial transferability workshops are scheduled to take place in Austria, Czechia, Finland and Spain.

The workshops will ensure that good practices and recommendations are accessible to service providers, public authorities, people with disabilities and other stakeholders in those countries. Action plans will also be developed for each country, in line with national contexts that may influence the deployment of user-centred funding models. As project lead, the EASPD will ensure that EU members remain informed about good practices.

Moreover, the project team is also planning a study with recommendations for policy planning and EU funding opportunities.