Coordinated care

For many people, care is rarely about a single visit to a single service.

Even for common conditions someone may, for example, start with their GP, go to a hospital for tests and then be referred to a service in the community, such as physiotherapy. In other cases, someone may need to move from hospital to residential care, or get the support from a home care service after a spell in hospital. Individually, health and care services could be outstanding, but if they are not working well together they may be failing people who move between them or who are finding it difficult to access services.

Person-centred care

Good care is care that is based on individuals' needs. It is care that seamlessly moves, for example, between GP, hospital, care home and back again. The care may be delivered by traditional services or by new models of care established to meet the nation's changing health and care demands.

These new models of care were highlighted in a document that set out a vision for the future of the NHS, NHS England's Five Year Forward View. Some are in place; some are in development; some are yet to be devised. More recently, the NHS Long Term Plan puts the focus firmly on integrated care; Integrated Care Systems (ICSs) are due to be established nationally by April 2021

Local area work

We are looking at how our regulation of providers could tell us more about how well systems are working to provide integrated care and how we can share information to promote quality and encourage improvement.

Regulation of integrated care systems is not within our current remit. Our powers and funding rules mean that we can only regulate individual providers. But we can learn more about systems from our provider regulation.

Previous work on integrated care included: