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Even those who were most critical of the Westminster government's decision to pay for nursing care and means-test personal care thought they had won a partial victory. The principle that nursing care, wherever provided, should be free at the point of delivery appeared to have prevailed.

Well, not quite. It has been suspected for a while that the Department of Health's definition of nursing care would differ from any common sense notion of it, and so it has proved.

If its new draft guidance on free nursing care in nursing homes was supposed to mark off health care needs from social care needs, it is a dismal failure. Instead, some health care in nursing homes will be paid for by the state, but some won't because nursing care has been given an excessively narrow interpretation. It is as if someone, asked to trace the border between England and Wales, had drawn the line through Birmingham. The result, of course, pleases no one.

"A slap with a cold flannel" was how Frank Ursell of the Registered Nursing Home Association described the proposals. Self-funding clients are angry because they will receive an average of £85 a week to fund their nursing care.

They will get nothing to pay for nursing tasks delegated to health care assistants, such as dressing ulcers and pressure sores, although these mundane ministrations are a large part of day-to-day health maintenance for them just as they are for their non fee-paying counterparts in hospitals.

Nurses are upset because they have got to assess 35,000 clients for nursing care needs by October. They dislike having to become "gatekeepers to care", rationing services to patients in whose best interests they should be acting, and are anxious because they will have as little as 10 minutes to spend on each assessment.

Social workers, for many of whom hurried assessments and service rationing are a necessary evil, may well empathise. They will point to last year's £750 million government underspend on health and local authority services as evidence that too many needs are going unmet. But social workers ought to be angry too at the way the government has handed responsibility for deciding the difference between nursing care and personal care to nurses alone.

Does the government think social workers have nothing worthwhile to say about clients who straddle the boundary between health and social care? Not only has it allowed the boundary to be drawn in the wrong place, it has allowed it to be drawn by the wrong people.