ESN was invited to become a member of a Sounding Board for the INTERLINKS research project. This is one of many projects funded under the European Commission’s research framework programme (FP7) in the area of health and social care. It aims to develop a “concept and methodology to describe and analyse long-term care and its links with the health system”. INTERLINKS research team is drawn from 16 partners in 14 countries and is coordinated by the European Centre for Social Welfare Policy and Research.

The project is due to finish in 2011 and its Sounding Board met for the first time in Brussels last week to give feedback on interim European Overview Papers on: Quality of Long-term Care; Prevention and Rehabilitation; Informal Care. There are already a number of interesting findings from the above reports:

•    “Countries with strong local steering capacities seem to provide a better context for the development of collaborative ‘integrated care’ approaches to prevention and rehabilitation in LTC... The existence of strong local steering capacities seems to be more important than the question of which actors should be in charge.”
•    “According to the English Audit Commission, the LTC system is stuck in a ‘vicious’ cycle’ in which increasing hospital admissions and use of expensive institutional forms of care leave and less money for alternative forms of service provision (thus ensuring even more hospital admissions in future).”
•    “The fact that governance of health care and long-term and/or social care are organised at different administrative levels, e.g. health care being a national or regional responsibility and LTC and social care conceived as regional or local responsibilities remain a problem for ... the provision of seamless services.”
•    “Estimations of the financial contribution of informal care to the overall costs of care provision range between 50-90% in most countries, thus being higher than formal care costs (with the exception of the Nordic countries).”

INTERLINKS final reports will be of interest to ESN members and all with an interest in social services. When published, ESN will disseminate them.