Successive governments have been clear about what health and care services should look like: co-ordinated, personalised and responsive care closer to home. We want to understand why the ambition to provide care closer to home has not been achieved.
Why we are doing this project
Over many years, successive governments have been clear about what health and care services should look like. They should provide proactive, co-ordinated, personalised and responsive care closer to where people live, moving care away from hospitals and with an increased focus on individual and local community assets. However, it’s clear that this vision is far from being achieved and in England we still have a system centred on hospitals and emergency care.
In this new project, we want to understand why, despite this shared vision, the ambition to provide care closer to home has not been achieved. We will explore the structural, political, financial and cultural barriers that have prevented it and how they might be overcome.
Project outputs
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Making care closer to home a reality
This report explores the factors that have prevented successive governments from putting primary and community services at its core and proposes several steps to begin this shift.
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Call for radical refocusing of health and care system to put primary and community services at its core
The health and care system in England must be radically refocused to put primary and community care at its core if it is to be effective and sustainable, according to a major new report ...
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The radical reform that’s been staring the NHS in the face
As debates around the future of the NHS continue, Beccy Baird asks a different question: how can the health and care service finally meet the ambition to deliver more care in the communi...
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Moving care closer to home: three unanswered questions
Danielle Jefferies considers what the health system needs to do to move care closer to home.
What we are doing
We will gather information, intelligence and learning from across the health and care system regarding this policy aim and consider why it has not yet been achieved.
We will do this by:
reviewing the research and policy evidence around relevant policy initiatives over the past 30 years
analysing national health and care datasets to identify relevant issues and trends
interviewing stakeholders who have experience and expertise in different aspects of the health and care system
holding a stakeholder workshop to challenge and refine our initial findings.
We will develop outputs to support health and care leaders and policy-makers in their current and future thinking, highlighting the barriers that have prevented proactive, co-ordinated, personalised and responsive community-based care from being implemented on a wide scale.
Key milestones
We began this project in May 2023 and shared our findings at our annual conference in November 2023, with final findings published in early 2024. We also hope to publish blogs and other outputs to detail emerging findings during the project.
Project team
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Beccy Baird
Senior Fellow -
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Deborah Fenney
Senior Researcher -
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Danielle Jefferies
Analyst -
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Holly Young
GP trainee -
Ros West
Senior co-ordinator
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