Joined-up care depends on someone doing the joining—but who pays for their time? Matt Russell, Chief Executive of Log my Care, explores the hidden costs of collaboration and how providers can build partnerships that work for the people they support and the businesses delivering their care.
Every provider I’ve spoken to since joining Log my Care wants the same thing for the people they support: the person at the centre, with family, support workers, the GP, the community nurse, the housing officer and the social worker around them, all working from the same picture of that person’s life. When that circle is connected, problems are spotted earlier and fewer of them turn into crises.
In care, partnership is everyday work. A supported living service might share a tenancy with a housing association, a care plan with a community learning disability team, a medication review with a GP and a weekly update with family. Each relationship exists for the person, and each one needs someone on the provider’s side to keep it moving.
What needs more consideration is how that connection is paid for, and how to make that investment work for care businesses. Partnership runs on staff time: the multidisciplinary meeting, the third phone call to chase a discharge summary, the same assessment filled in for three organisations in three formats. On tight margins, those hours usually come from the rota or the registered manager’s evenings. If care ecosystems are going to last, providers need to treat every partnership as a business decision, with a cost, an owner and a measure of success.
Partnership in practice
Specialist Homecare Group (SHG), a Log my Care customer, supports people with learning disabilities in supported living services from Cumbria to Cornwall. Its old way of working carried the hidden costs above: staff copied information between spreadsheets by hand, and commissioning conversations lacked hard evidence of impact.
SHG resourced its relationship with funders on purpose. Its PBS practitioners own the evidence, tracking year-on-year changes in support ratios against each person’s care plan, and the same data feeds the incident and risk reporting SHG gives commissioners. The return is measurable: between April 2025 and April 2026, SHG reduced care hours by 40,404 and saved funders £1.213 million, while supporting people towards greater independence. Over the same journey SHG has grown from two people at a single site to 40, with managers keeping day-to-day oversight without needing to be on site.
Making partnership sustainable
Understanding the cost starts with making it visible. For one month, ask managers to log the time they spend on partnership work: meetings, duplicated assessments, repeated information requests and chasing updates. The total is rarely small, and it becomes the evidence base for every conversation that follows.
The next step is agreeing who does what. A short partnership agreement covering responsibilities, information-sharing routes and meeting frequency stops the drift where everyone assumes someone else is coordinating. Coordination time then needs to be built into service costs. A clear case that a complex placement needs a set number of liaison hours a month to stay stable carries far more weight with commissioners than a general request for a higher rate.
That investment also needs a measure of success. A partnership earns its place when it frees capacity, reduces avoidable admin or strengthens continuity for the person. Pick one or two measures for each relationship, such as admin hours, unplanned hospital admissions or missed handovers, and review them every quarter. If nothing has moved after two quarters, renegotiate or step back.
Capacity matters too. New partnerships are tempting, especially when they bring referrals or funding, but each one needs to be tested against the capacity your team has today. One partnership delivered reliably is worth more than three delivered patchily.
Where technology fits
Technology can take some of the weight out of partnership work when it’s chosen with the same discipline. Start with where your coordination hours go today. For many services, it’s pulling the same information together for different partners, or finding out what has changed since the last review.
A shared, current care record lets teams write information once and give partners, families and visiting professionals the access they need. Reporting drawn from everyday recording turns a commissioner update into a short task. Good technology gets out of the way and gives that time back to the people providers support.
Joined-up care has a cost, and today providers carry most of it. The ones who count that cost, build it into their model and measure what it returns will build networks that last.
