Social Care Capacity & Demand Tool

Capacity. For each role we start from contracted hours per week and annualise them. We subtract annual leave and bank holidays, then take off a percentage for sickness, learning and development, meetings and supervision, admin and recording, and travel. What is left is client-contact time. A team-wide contingency keeps the plan off 100%. A team is called balanced when it is within about 0.15 WTE either way, so a utilisation figure a few points over 100% can still show as balanced. The result is contact hours available per month.

Demand. Each pathway has a monthly intake of new cases, split across low, moderate and high demand. For each severity you set the ongoing contact hours per open case per month and the average case length in months. Average case length turns intake into an active open caseload (intake × length), so a case opened in January still counts in February and March. Monthly demand hours = active caseload × monthly hours per case.

Balance. Capacity minus demand, in hours per month, and expressed as whole-time equivalents. The WTE conversion uses a fixed reference full-time worker (37 hours a week, 33 leave days, and deductions of 4% sickness, 5% learning and development, 10% meetings and supervision, 15% admin and 14% travel, giving about 73 contact hours a month) rather than your own averages, so the same gap means the same thing whatever mix of contracts you have entered. If your team's contracts are materially shorter than 37 hours, the real number of people needed will be higher than the WTE figure shown.

By team. Assign each role and each pathway to a team, and the tool maps every team's capacity against its own demand. A service can sit at a comfortable total while individual teams are badly over or under pressure, so the team view is where rebalancing decisions are made. This mirrors the Stoke-on-Trent method of modelling by sub-team, and the caseload-weighting approach set out in the Department for Education's 2025 workload review. The tool is there to inform manager judgement, not replace it, and its output is only as good as the audited data you put in, and the data collection guide button at the top explains how to gather it.