The Health and Social Care Act 2012 sets out a responsibility for the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) to develop quality standards and guidelines for social care in England. All guidelines produced by NICE have a strong evidence base, drawing on existing guidance in each area. The standards take the form of concise sets of prioritised statements designed to drive measurable quality improvements within a particular area of health or care.
NICE have a consultation underway seeking views from the sector on a list of proposed social care topics, with an encouragement to suggest new ones too. Responses must be submitted to socialcaretopics@nice.org.uk by 5pm on 9 October 2015. This is a joint consultation with the Department of Health (DH).
An initial set of topics has been referred by the Department of Health (DH) and Department for Education (DfE). In order to develop the longer term NICE social care work programme and improve care, the DH and NICE now want to hear from stakeholders to help decide on potential additional topics. This will inform the quality standards programme and where there are no existing relevant guidelines, this topic list will also inform the development of future guidelines.
The proposed topics are:
More details on these topics can be found here.