Joint Working in health and social care service improvement

for service users
Care can come from many directions - medical care (health), personal care (usually social care also charities), and a whole lot of areas where the distinction isn't so clear. To the recipient of services, it doesn't matter - and nobody likes to have unnecessary visits by multiple people because of the politics of the situation.
From the staff perspective
Caring professionals may express their care in different ways at different points in their career. Staff move between health and social care employers, sometimes simply because responsibility for providing the service, and therefore the money to pay the wages, moves.
Consultancy addressing these issues
One of the greatest missed opportunities in the caring services has been the need to plan workforce around patient pathways. Some regions have good links between workforce planning in NHS, and with local authority social care groups. Others don't.

Champions of the Future Workforce was a national group hosted by Skills for Health to bring togetehr representatives from each region, to learn from each other and spread best practice.
Service providers often focus on delivery for users, and in a caring industry may find it difficult to understand why the commissioners (especially of mandatory services) dont seem to share their enthusiasm. At the same time commissioners are wary of the promises given, with neither evidence nor a monitoring regime. Commissioning Innovation is a series of coaching workshops to address this issue, getting providers off development grants and to sustainable funding and contracts for services. We also developed a one-day workshop to explore the issues locally which might be of interest.
Social enterprises have been used as a legal structure for formerly public sector provided services. Having set up a social enterprise providing community care using NHS staff, I believe this is a workable model. I'm currently establishing a GP Provider Consortium which has different merits in a different context