Guidance
This guideline covers planning and delivering social care and support for older people who have multiple long-term conditions. It promotes an integrated and person-centred approach to delivering effective health and social care services.
The Care Quality Commission uses NICE guidelines as evidence to inform the inspection process.
Last reviewed: 4 November 2015
Next review: This guidance will be reviewed if there is new evidence that is likely to change the recommendations.
Recommendations
The guideline includes recommendations on:
- identifying and assessing social care needs
- care planning, including the role of the named care coordinator
- supporting carers
- integrating health and social care planning
- delivering care
- preventing social isolation
- training health and social care practitioners
Who is it for?
- Health and social care practitioners
- Providers of care and support in health and social care services
- Older people with social care needs and multiple long-term conditions (including both physical and mental health conditions), and their carers.
Commissioners should ensure any service specifications take into account the recommendations in this guideline.
Guideline development process
How we develop NICE guidelines
Your responsibility
The recommendations in this guideline represent the view of NICE, arrived at after careful consideration of the evidence available. When exercising their judgement, professionals and practitioners are expected to take this guideline fully into account, alongside the individual needs, preferences and values of their patients or the people using their service. It is not mandatory to apply the recommendations, and the guideline does not override the responsibility to make decisions appropriate to the circumstances of the individual, in consultation with them and their families and carers or guardian.
All problems (adverse events) related to a medicine or medical device used for treatment or in a procedure should be reported to the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency using the Yellow Card Scheme.
Local commissioners and providers of healthcare have a responsibility to enable the guideline to be applied when individual professionals and people using services wish to use it. They should do so in the context of local and national priorities for funding and developing services, and in light of their duties to have due regard to the need to eliminate unlawful discrimination, to advance equality of opportunity and to reduce health inequalities. Nothing in this guideline should be interpreted in a way that would be inconsistent with complying with those duties.
Commissioners and providers have a responsibility to promote an environmentally sustainable health and care system and should assess and reduce the environmental impact of implementing NICE recommendations wherever possible.