Intermediate Care

Approaches to evaluation

Andrea Steiner, Barbara Vaughan, Lynda Hanford
July 1999 | ISBN 978 1 85717 222 5 | 116 pages | £5.00

A wide range of initiatives have been set up during recent years to use intermediate care as a means to support patients moving between acute, primary and social care. But this paper reports that they have often been implemented without pre-testing and with an absence of any hard information that the new service will work. Furthermore, where evaluation does take place, it does not always bring out the most positive features of the service being delivered. Drawing on a seminar held to discuss strategies for evaluating intermediate care and to compare participants' experiences, this paper makes a series of proposals for ways forward.