Health Services and Social Services

(asked on 12th January 2018) - View Source

Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what steps his Department is taking to integrate health and social care policy.


Answered by
Caroline Dinenage Portrait
Caroline Dinenage
This question was answered on 22nd January 2018

In March 2017, the Department of Health and Social Care and the Department for Communities and Local Government, working with the Local Government Association, Association of Directors of Adult Social Services and NHS England, published the Integration and Better Care Fund Policy Framework 2017-19. The document includes the policy framework for the implementation of the Better Care Fund (BCF), which is the first national, mandatory integration policy. The BCF has helped to join up health and care services so people can manage their own health and wellbeing, and live independently in their communities for as long as possible. In both 2015-16 and 2016-17, local areas voluntarily pooled more than the minimum required taking the total to £5.3 billion and £5.9 billion respectively.

The Policy Framework also sets out our proposals for going beyond the BCF towards further integration, including that areas will be allowed to ‘graduate’ once they have demonstrated that they have moved beyond the requirements of BCF reporting and are exemplars of integration. To help local areas understand whether they are meeting our integration ambition, the Department is developing integration metrics for assessing progress, particularly at the interface where health and social care interact. The Department is working with the Social Care Institute for Excellence to better understand good practice in integrated care and how the Department could develop a more balanced set of measures of success in this area.

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