Driving the move towards integrated care

In 2012, the new Health and Social Care Act gave NICE a pivotal role in the government’s plans to improve social care. What seemed strange to some – that an organisation with a reputation for clinical care was to tackle social care – was only logical in the move towards truly integrated care. We were tasked with using the NICE rigour, developed over years of carefully and thoughtfully assessing evidence on health outcomes, to improve social care; a challenge we were more than willing to rise to.

We did not take the job lightly. We drew on the networks within the Social Care Institute for Excellence (SCIE), held workshops with key stakeholders and piloted our methods to see how well they would hold up in the social care setting. This was a relationship we were going to commit to and our intent was to deliver advice that would make a difference. Each guideline we produce sets out recommendations about best practice in specified areas of social care, drawn from the latest evidence-based research. Our quality standards pull out the key areas to prioritise from our guidelines and other accredited sources in order to define what a really good service should look like.

There is no doubt that there are many social care services providing great quality care. We only have to look to recent news from the Care Quality Commission. Their latest inspection into care homes in England reported that services were offering safer, higher quality and more compassionate care. Nearly three quarters of care homes originally rated inadequate had improved ratings, with over 12,000 people benefitting from better, safer care.