Integrating wellness and social care is the only way to ease stress on the NHS

‘The probability of far more disgruntlement than disaster is strengthened by references to the creaking canard that nearby government can not be trusted.’ Photograph: Alamy

In 1997 Labour was speaking about breaking down the Berlin wall in between overall health and social care. Practically twenty years later, what’s altered? Nicely, not a great deal in terms of systematic integration, but a extremely great deal in terms of government finances.

And which is the variation. Proper integration that offers better care for many hundreds of thousands of men and women, as properly as conserving scarce assets, is fundamentally crucial for the long term viability of both regional government and health services across the nation.

Which is why Guardian readers may well have been surprised to read that the Much better Care Fund, the initial tangible complete-technique move in the direction of integration, could be delayed pending considerations about regardless of whether the planned financial savings could be delivered. This will have worried many in neighborhood government, who have spent months operating on thorough proposals with clinicians.

Could this imply that integration of wellness and social care is just unrealistic? It really is certainly real that the technical and bureaucratic hurdles to joining up the two providers are really formidable, so it should surprise no one particular that the fund is not proving easy to establish. Nonetheless, as the Department of Health was swift to level out, the scheme isn’t going to go live till April 2015 so it appears premature for commentators to be creating off the programme with practically a year to go.

Yet another barrier to integration is the culture clash amongst the various methods. It is feasible that this story is significantly less about the fund itself, and a lot more about the unhappiness of some vested interests within Whitehall and elements of the NHS.

The likelihood that there is much more disgruntlement than disaster is strengthened by some of the references in the story to the creaking canard that regional government can’t be trusted, since any income left inside range of councils will be snaffled to fill in potholes – in buy to win more than the “local authority vote”, whatever that is. There also seems to be a belief that an injection of £2bn would be ample to “rebuild the local government public finances”, which may possibly raise a wry smile with some.

But all of this is a distraction from the vital point that integration is the only viable way to release some of the extreme stress on our healthcare technique. Even though the Greater Care Fund model is not the only automobile for integration, if essential figures in Whitehall and the health establishment can not carry themselves to assistance radical reform for a more preventive, effective program – as people across the political and specialist spectrum have argued for decades – the long term could be bleak certainly.

Alex Thomson is chief executive of the localism thinktank Localis.

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Integrating wellness and social care is the only way to ease stress on the NHS