CYP Now - Integrated care service vital to help support troubled families

Integrated care is an idea with legs. It is gaining currency among the major political parties, as they realise that the segregation of health and social care, for example, leads to waste, duplication and gaps through which service users easily fall.

But two things remain true of the discussion around integrated care. First, the term is usually meant solely in relation to adults and, indeed, more specifically elderly services. It is not being widely talked about for children's services. Second, it is not seen as being much wider than a joining, in a relatively loose sense, of health and social care.

Not that bringing together health and social care wouldn't be a tremendous start for children and adolescent services. Just imagine if child protection services could rely on joint investigations that had, as their starting point, a single health and social care response. Or that, in the areas of disability, we were no longer troubled by whether the overwhelming needs of a child were social or health-related simply because the outcome determines who pays the service bill.

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