July 12, 2018
The Better Care Fund (BCF) is a new approach to funding care and services for people that use both NHS health services and local council social care. The BCF is intended to help the NHS and social care work more closely together, by creating a shared budget and a joint planning process for services that help people leave hospital in a timely way, and to prevent people being admitted hospital in the first place when it could be avoided.
The Policy Research Unit on Quality and Outcomes of Person-Centred Care (QORU) was commissioned to carry out a system’s level evaluation of the BCF. The main aims of the study were to, first, describe how local sites were planning to configure and spend their BCF; second to assess the views of people on the ground about the progress of implementation and expected impact of the BCF; and third, to examine the effect of the BCF on two outcome indicators: delayed transfers of care (DTOCs) and non-elective emergency admissions.
The final report is available at https://www.pssru.ac.uk/qoru/bcf-final-report.