Making it work for older adults
In 2024, 20 councils joined a ‘community of practice’ to work through a deceptively simple question: how do you make proactive prevention for older adults work at scale?
Not in theory, not in a single pilot, but consistently – across different places, different systems and different starting points.
What emerged from the community of practice – convened by the LGA and consultants Newton, and Atlantic Customer Services – was the foundation for something more concrete than shared learning and a potential delivery model.
Several of those councils have since joined the Future of Prevention Academy, a national programme developed with Newton, with continued support from the LGA. This is now live and working towards the first large-scale national evidence base for proactive prevention in adult social care.
The Department of Health and Social Care is contributing by sponsoring development of evaluation methodology. Through this programme, participating councils are putting into practice a
co-designed delivery model – grounded in connected data and analytics enabled by artificial intelligence – to design, implement and evaluate specific preventative interventions.
They are doing this as part of a collective improvement cycle with a peer network that compounds learning across the cohort, rather than repeating the familiar pattern of isolated pilots that never quite scale up.
The theoretical benefit from prevention is well established. What has been much harder is collating evidence for investment, building the infrastructure to enable it to work consistently and achieving scale.
For residents, earlier identification of risk means earlier support: intervention before a situation reaches crisis, rather than after.
For councils, the implications extend further than adult social care alone. The same data infrastructure and prevention capability is directly applicable to homelessness prevention, children’s services, and other areas where demand is rising and late intervention is costly.
The first wave of the academy focuses on adult social care, but the approach is designed to extend council-wide.
Within the Innovation Zone at the LGA’s annual conference next week (7-9 July), three councils in wave one of the Future of Prevention Academy programme will share their honest, early experience of what this looks like in practice: what is working; what is harder than expected; and what the wider sector can learn.
The programme is designed to grow and the session is the place to hear directly from those already in it.
In the zone
The Innovation Zone is a key part of the LGA’s annual conference in Bournemouth from 7-9 July.
It provides a platform for practical innovation, peer learning and sector leadership, helping councils and combined authorities share what works and strengthen improvement across local government.
Sessions cover everything from improving landlord services with tenants, rethinking neighbourhood health, and community energy, to local growth, keeping families together, making culture count, and building a unitary council from the ground up.
Find out more about the zone and to book your conference place.
- For more information, contact Simon Williams, the LGA’s Director of Social Care Improvement, at simon.williams@local.gov.uk