The three workshops in this research project were key to understanding how actors related to each other in the different countries. Each workshop brought together three participants from two countries, representing: a financer (in most cases a municipality), a provider organisation (a mixture of for-profit and non-profit organisations) and a country expert.

Czech Republic and Spain - 22 July 2010, Brighton

Both the Czech Republic and Spain have introduced cash allowances for people needing care in recent years. People are assessed by the regions (autonomous communities) in Spain and by the municipalities in the Czech Republic. Both are struggling with the fact that users have mostly chosen cash benefits (used to enable informal care) instead of services, even though the law was motivated partly to stimulate the development of a care market in which users would purchase formal services.

Quality standards required by legislation are rather inconsistent in Spain compared to the Czech Republic: the Czech model is to accredit every provider according to the same standards country-wide, even though regional agencies manage the process. The Spanish model is to establish minimum standards for accreditation centrally, but then to allow the autonomous communities to require additional standards for providers in their region.

Funding was also different: providers in the Czech Republic are used to a continuous process of applying for grants from various national ministries, regions, municipalities, foundations and international organisations. Spanish providers are used to applying just to the region for accreditation or to the municipality through tenders, and then have relatively stable funding for a given period.
Practice presentations from the financer and provider organisations can be downloaded under CFQ in Practice. ESN is grateful to the workshop participants for their contribution to the project.
 

Read about the other workshops: Belgium (Flanders) & Sweden and Germany & UK (England)

To find out more about our work on Contracting for Quality please email Stephen Barnett in the ESN Secretariat using firstname.lastname@esn-eu.org