Executive Summary

Why Integrate? People need health, social care, housing and other public services to work seamlessly together to deliver better quality care. More joined up services help improve the health and care of local populations and may make more efficient use of available resources.

How is Integration being done? There is no single wayto integrate health and care. Some areas are looking to scale-up existing initiatives such as the New Care Models programme and the Integration Pioneers. Others are using local devolution or Sustainabilityand Transformation Plans as the impetus for their integration efforts.

One part of the solution – the Better Care Fund The Better Care Fund is the only mandatory policy to facilitate integration. It brings together health and social care funding, with a major injection of social care money announced at Spring Budget 2017. This policy framework for the Fund covers two financial years to align with NHS planning timetables and to give areas the opportunity to plan more strategically. Details of the financial breakdown are below:

Better Care Fund funding contribution (£bn) 2017-18 2018-19

Minimum NHS (clinical commissioning groups) contribution £3.582 £3.65

Disabled Facilities Grant (capital funding for adaptations to houses) £0.431 £0.468

New grant allocation for adult social care (Improved Better Care Fund)* £1.115 £1.499

Total £5.128 billion £5.617 billion

*Combined amounts announced at Spending Review 2015 and Spring Budget 2017

Many areas choose to pool more than is required. For 2017-19, there are four national conditions, rather than the previous eight:

1. Plans to be jointly agreed

2. NHS contribution to adult social care is maintained in line with inflation

4. Managing Transfers of Care (a new condition to ensure people’s care transfers smoothly between services and settings).

Beyond this, areas have flexibility in how the Fund is spent over health, care and housing schemes or services, but need to agree how this spending will improve performance in the following four metrics: Delayed transfers of care; Non-elective admissions (General and Acute); Admissions to residential and care homes; and Effectiveness of reablement.

Going beyond the Better Care Fund through Graduation The Better Care Fund is intended to encourage further integration and 90% of areas say it has already had a positive impact on integration locally. For the most integrated areas, there will be benefits in graduating from the Fund to reduce the reporting and oversight to which they are subjected. We are planning to test the graduation process with a small numberof advanced areas (6 to 10) in a ‘first wave’, in order to develop our criteria for graduation for all areas. We are therefore inviting ‘Expressions of Interest’ from areas that think they are exemplars of integration, by 28th April 2017.

Agreeing a local vision of integration As part of Better Care Fund planning, we are asking areas to set out how they are going to achieve further integration by 2020. We would encourage areas to align their approach to health and care integration with Sustainability and Transformation Plan geographies, where appropriate. This may be an exact match (e.g. Greater Manchester) or it may be smaller units within Sustainability and Transformation Plans. The focus may also be on commissioning integration (e.g. North East Lincolnshire) or through Accountable Care Systems or Organisations that bring together provision (e.g. Northumberland). What matters is that there is locally agreed clarity on the approach and the geographical footprint which will be the focus for integration.

Measuring progress on integration To help areas understand whether they are meeting our integration ambition, we are seeking to rapidly develop integration metrics for assessing progress, particularly at the interface where health and social care interact. These will combine outcome metrics, user experience and process measures. Following the development of the metrics and an assessment of local areas, we will ask the Care Quality Commission to carry out targeted reviews in a small number of areas, starting as soon as is practical from May 2017. These reviews will be focused on the interface of health and social care.

Need more detail? Further information on everything here can be found in the full Integration and Better Care Fund Policy Framework 2017-19.