Lack of health and social care service integration lets down UK's most vulnerable

A study by the Audit Commission into the nationwide integration of health and social care services has recorded stuttering results, with as many services making no ground whatsoever on utilising the capabilities of social care to prevent bed blocking in hospitals as those who have seen its benefits.

A lack of enthusiasm for care reform throughout local councils and NHS services seems to be revealing itself as the dominant problem in achieving more efficient services and utilising the UK’s healthcare potential. Integration of health and social care has long been voiced as crucial, not only for achieving services that are more personalised and flexible to circumstance, but also to improve the capabilities of hospital emergency services that benefit from more elderly people being treated in their own home and avoiding unnecessary admissions. The findings are made more frustrating when considering that attaining such efficiencies is largely achievable without having to wait for any wide-scale care reform, Government schemes or funding. In fact integration goals would seem to directly suit the current challenges public sector services are experiencing due to austerity cuts.

While many councils would have seemed to have made little ground in working with NHS bodies to achieve more cost effective services, ever since it became quite obvious after the Credit Crunch of three years ago that public sector cuts would result, it would seem that a great deal of effort has been made in cutting both social care expenditure and tightening eligibility criteria. While it has already been reported in these pages how Central Government’s extra £2bn of funding for social care would seem to have been ignored by the majority of councils that subsequently cut expenditure, this week has seen further figures emerge, from the Department of Health, that confirms an estimated 120,000 people, who were previously receiving some form of domiciliary service, are now having to get by without due to no longer being interpreted as having critical needs.

If councils had put as much effort into achieving a more integrated service over the last three years, then perhaps the hit that elderly with care needs have taken as a result would have been less severe. In this context, it is difficult not to think back to pre-local election pledges that time and time again stressed, whilst acknowledging that cuts to services were inevitable, that austerity should be achieved at the same time as protecting society’s most vulnerable. Based on recent figures it would hardly seem that the vulnerable have emerged as any kind of priority by those who finance the public services their well-being depends on.

A PDF of the Audit Commission’s report is attached.