Prevention about more than just social care

Social care should not be left alone to provide preventive services, the Social Exclusion Unit has said.

Luke O’Shea, team leader for the unit’s excluded older people’s group, said that funding had to be boosted across services, including transport and housing, to support prevention.

He said: “There’s a bigger prize if we can get the other parts of the system, that have a higher political profile than social care, to deliver on the preventive agenda.”

Jon Glasby, senior lecturer at Birmingham University’s Health Services Management Centre, said that this would require joint performance indicators.