News

Barking and Dagenham Council, east London, has seen improvements in health following the integration of social services and health care under one leader more than six months ago, it has been claimed.

Julia Ross, director of social services since 1998, took up the joint post of chief executive of the primary care trust in April this year.

Speaking at the Integrating Health and Social Care conference in Barking, Ross said there had been "real" and "immediate" health improvements in access, teenage pregnancy and coronary heart disease. In addition staff felt they were doing a better job and users believed services were better, she said.

Ross spends around 80 per cent of her time on primary care and the rest on social services, still sitting on the council's management board and the executive committee.

The PCT, which now covers social care, has dual governance and accountability to both the local authority and the health service.

The PCT board is chaired by a local councillor and there is a pooled budget of up to £168m.

Ross said that a key achievement had been to respond "collaboratively" to delayed discharges. When she first arrived three years ago, trying to deal with delayed discharges across acute and primary care and social services was a "very tricky problem" because it felt as if they were in three different camps. But the situation was different now, she said.

The conference also heard that the government would only continue its support for the integration of health and social services if the restructuring delivered its priorities for the NHS.

Social care consultant Tom Noon from consultancy firm Cordis Bright said the priorities of central government were to significantly improve the performance of the NHS, to reduce the numbers of older people in hospital who could be moved out, and to reduce the number of older people entering hospital in the first place, he claimed.

Noon added that while health and social services were the cornerstone of a strategy aimed at supporting the independence of vulnerable people, it could only be delivered by working with housing, education, regeneration and the independent sector.