An underpriced placement can lose money for years — and an unsafe one can end a service. We help you assess, cost and respond to referrals with evidence commissioners respect.
Referrals arrive incomplete by design: risk histories summarised, support needs understated, and an expected price already anchored low. Providers who respond with a round number and goodwill discover the truth after admission — when the real support hours, staffing ratios and risks emerge, and the fee is already fixed.
Our referral service reverses that dynamic. We interrogate the referral for information gaps and ask the questions that surface true need before commitment: behavioural history, health needs, risk incidents, previous placement breakdowns, funding authority and review arrangements.
Then we build the costing from evidence upward — assessed support hours, staffing model including sleep-ins or waking nights where justified, management and oversight time, and genuine overheads — producing both a defensible fee and the rationale document that justifies it line by line.
Commissioners are professionally obliged to challenge fees — but their challenge collapses against genuine evidence. A costing that maps each support hour to an assessed need, each staffing decision to a documented risk, and each rate to a transparent cost base is very hard to argue down, because arguing it down means arguing the need doesn’t exist. Providers using our costing rationale documents consistently report a different quality of negotiation: less haggling over totals, more discussion of need — which is where providers win.
We review the referral against a structured framework, identify every information gap and draft the clarification questions that surface true need and risk.
Support hours, ratios, skill mix and cover requirements — including nights and escalation contingency — are assessed from the evidence.
A full costing is constructed: direct staffing at true cost, management time, overheads and margin, with a written rationale evidencing every line.
We draft your commissioner response, prepare you for the fee discussion and support review or uplift mechanisms in the placement agreement.
Referrals run on commissioner timescales, so we work to them — a structured review and initial costing is typically produced within days of receiving the papers, faster for urgent placements. Send the referral documents and your deadline and we will confirm turnaround immediately.
Then you decide from a position of knowledge rather than hope: accept with documented risk, negotiate specific lines, or decline. Providers who decline unviable placements with a professional, evidenced rationale protect the relationship — commissioners remember who was straight with them. Accepting silently and failing later damages it far more.
Yes — existing packages are frequently underfunded against needs that have escalated since admission. We rebuild the costing against current assessed need and prepare the uplift request with evidence, which is the standard route to correcting a legacy fee.
Both — supported living, domiciliary packages, complex care, 16–18 placements and residential referrals, each costed within its own funding and commissioning conventions.
Providers receiving referrals across supported living, home care, children’s services, complex care and accommodation-based support.
Send us the papers and your deadline — we’ll tell you what it really costs to deliver safely.