Kings Fund, February 2014
- Report from a King’s Fund working group of community providers to explore the steps that are required to change community services in line with the aims to move care closer to home outlined in the policy Transforming Community Care.
- Key messages include:
- A simple pattern of services should be developed, based around primary care and natural geographies and with a multidisciplinary team. These teams need to work in new ways with specialist services – both community and hospital based, to offer patients a much more complete and less fragmented service.
- New models need to include both mental health and social care, including the management of the health and social care budget for the care of their patients.
- services need to be capable of a very rapid response and to work with hospitals to speed up discharge.
- New ways to contract and pay for these services are needed
- Community services also need to reach out into communities more effectively.
