Care trusts

< Influencers contents | Print this page

Establishing care trusts

The first care trusts, providing both social and primary care and mental health services, went live on 1 April 2002. One of these was Northumberland Care Trust, with a budget of £330m and over 1,000 health and social care staff. The care trust was formed from four primary care groups and other local social services. The others that have started up are mental health and social care trusts based in provider units, not PCTs.

Care trusts were announced in the NHS Plan, and build on existing opportunities for joint working provided by the Health & Social Care Act (2001) partnership arrangements. They are able to commission and/or provide for all health-related local authority functions, including social care (and some aspects of housing and education), from a single organisation. Care trusts will provide greater opportunities for integrating commissioning and provision, according to local needs, and this will include mental health, care of older people and children’s services. See the DH section on care trusts for more details.

Despite these major organisational changes, the act also allows non-structural ways forward and we are beginning to see the establishment of a number of joint posts across health and social care. For example, South Tyneside Council and Gateshead and South Tyneside PCT has appointed a head of community care to help implement the NSF for older people. Such joint appointments and the involvement of local government social services staff in care trusts essentially creates a brand new NHS customer base for those NHS influencers operating in the relevant clinical areas, such as mental health. But note that the initiative appears to be slowing down with some of the later wave care trusts planned being considerably delayed. The care trust initiative appears to have fallen down the list of current government priorities and essentially seems to have stalled.