Recommendation 24

The Department was renamed the Department of Health and Social Care (from the Department of Health) in January 2018, with the intention of delivering a greater focus on adult social care.We observed that social care is only reflected in “a lot of little bits” in the Department’s Annual Reports and Accounts. We therefore asked how social care delivery for users was being improved. NHS England told us that “a lot of work is already going on” including moving towards having joint social care and NHS assessment teams. It explained that this created a single process for assessing the care package needed for each patient and how it should be delivered, which should also result in earlier discharge from hospital. It also told us that it had undertaken work over the last 18 months to consider how it could improve intermediate care, focusing on physical rehabilitation when patients were leaving hospital, which it planned to roll out in 2026.40