White paper calls for integration between the NHS and social care

A white paper, published by homecare technology company Birdie, has called for more integration between the NHS and social care.

‘Ready to care: The first steps to fixing social care’, published on 17 September 2024, proposes a unified “village of care” model that brings the two sectors together into a patient-centred system.

Featuring input from 20 social care leaders, NHS trusts, and home care providers, the paper highlights the disconnect between the NHS and social care sectors, which it says contributes to 1.1 million blocked beds and 64% of medically fit patients having to wait for social care as of April 2024.

Co-authors Max Parmentier, chief executive of Birdie, and Rachael Crook, chief executive of social care provider Lifted, outline seven recommendations for the government to adopt at the Labour party conference and in the autumn budget.

Parmentier, said that social care is “one of the most important pillars of our society and economy”.

“Although the sector has come a long way, we still face severe challenges, with over 400,000 people awaiting assessment to start being cared for and a significant funding gap to sustain the level of current care delivery in the community,” he added.

The paper calls for the government to mandate real-time data sharing between hospitals and care providers by integrating social care software with the NHS Capacity Tracker, a cloud-based digital insight tool built by NECS in partnership with NHS England that enables social care providers to share vacancy and other critical information in real time.

This, the white paper says, would improve patient discharge processes, resource planning, and collaboration between the NHS and social care sectors.

It also recommends an online national support service for the five million unpaid carers, whose care is valued at £162 billion, which the paper says would provide essential information and resources, identify previously unrecognised carers, and collect data to inform future policy.

The paper also calls for the Care Quality Commission (CQC) to reform its assessment methodology, notably around a small number of core quality indicators, tracked digitally from each provider in real time.

A Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) review, published in July 2024, found ‘significant problems’ with IT systems had contributed to failings at the CQC.

Other recommendations in the white paper include legislation to better connect social care with NHS boards, a leadership development programme for social care leaders, and solutions for travel time issues for the care workforce.

Crook said: “We have brought together the best of the sector to present innovative practical low-cost solutions that can be implemented by the Labour government now.”

The paper’s publication follows Lord Ara Darzi’s independent investigation into the state of the NHS in England, published on 12 September, which highlighted the “dire state of social care”.

“Social care has not been valued or resourced sufficiently, which has both a profound human cost and economic consequences,” Lord Darzi writes.

Meanwhile, NHS England told Digital Health News there are no plans to add social care to the Digital Maturity Assessment in 2025, despite calls from the sector for its inclusion.