Recommendation 8

We asked the Department about how it was measuring the effectiveness of joint working between health and social care in delivering better outcomes for the people they served. We heard that CQC inspections, which were now measuring systems as well as institutions, and a “colossal improvement” in data gave the Department a lot more information than it had had before the COVID-19 pandemic. For example, the Department told us that the metrics it was tracking around the number of care packages and hospital discharge, such as how many discharged patients returned to hospital within 90 days, were the real key performance indicators (KPIs) on how the system was working.13 We shared our concerns that there seemed to be no strategy for pulling together these data and KPIs from across the sector and then publishing it and making it accessible. The Department insisted that CQC inspection was providing transparency and that it published a lot of data.14 We acknowledged that there may be more data published and that aggregate data may be available to the Department and to CQC. However, we challenged on how easy it was for members of the public or MPs to understand this data and use it to compare their area with another comparable area, as it had been with Primary Care Trusts.15 The Department provided written evidence after the session to explain the data it publishes on outcomes for ICSs. However very few, if any, of these metrics directly relate to social care, and it is not clear if ICS performance against these metrics is published. The Department also highlighted that there are specific metrics for integrated care in the Better Care Fund Policy Framework 2023–25, but these are only used to set “ambitions” for local systems, without an assessment of whether or not they were achieved.16 Additional funding for adult social care