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Health and Social Care Bill

I had just got going. I was quoting from Sir Ian Kennedy when he spoke to the Public Bill Committee in another place and emphasised the differences between health and social care. I had not got very far, so perhaps I may go back to the beginning of what he had to say: "““The health and social care sectors are significantly different, so different models of regulation will remain appropriate, despite the new legislation. Dominating the healthcare sector are large, publicly funded providers with many highly technical services. The social care sector comprises 26,000 mostly smaller, privately funded providers, mostly concerned with care which is non-technical and in which matters such as dignity are at the fore. As a result, regulation in healthcare is more information-based and can therefore be more confidently risk-based than in social care, which is based more on visits by way of inspection””." One can summarise these differences in the regulatory methodology employed by health and social care by saying that the regulation of healthcare facilities proceeds much more by looking at large datasets kept by these mostly large organisations to see where the risks are to be found, and in the skills and experience required in the two sectors. While almost everyone has some experience of health services, that is not the case for social care. There are also complex inter-relationships between social care provision and other services, including extra care housing, employment services and benefits. A whole different body of expertise is required for the regulation of social care when compared with the health sector. These are generalisations and obviously I am not trying to say that health inspection does not rely on visits to premises and facilities at all or that the examination of data is not appropriate in social care regulation, but what I have said serves to characterise correctly, I think, a general distinction that exists between the two kinds of regulation.