Integrating Health and Social Care Services

BACKGROUND: A recent UK Government draft Heath White Paper follows the NHS England long term plan when it states that NHS England requires “a new framework that builds on changes already being made as well as building in the flexibility to support the system to tackle challenges of the future”. At present the structure of Health and Social Care Services UK reporting to Government seems unhelpfully complex and opaque. OBJECTIVE: The purpose of this paper is to contribute to the building of a new framework using a generic approach to identify and use ‘systemic processes’ to facilitate the integration of Health and Social Care services in NHS England and elsewhere. METHODS: We highlight some of the critical issues that are currently hindering integration and set out a new way of understanding the structure of NHS England through an ‘inside-out’ analysis of systemic processes. RESULTS: We describe and give three examples of existing systemic processes as ‘Consulting a patient’, ‘Enhancing a Single point of access’ - to mental health services and ‘Delivering health and social care services England’. CONCLUSIONS: Rethinking the interactions between existing organisations could arguably bring considerable benefits including cost savings, better co-ordination, less ‘admin’ stress on staff where the work is done and provide more organisational adaptability in an uncertain future. Ultimately our suggestions are aimed at helping people to deliver better patient care - the impelling purpose of all health and social care services.