This report was commissioned by NHS Employers and the Local Government Association.
This report looks at the evidence on new roles and ways of spanning organisational workforce boundaries to deliver integrated health and social care. It finds increasing focus on roles which facilitate co-ordination and management of care, development of existing roles to increase the skill-mix and enable the provision of more holistic care, and a limited number of truly innovative roles, the most notable being care navigators and community facilitators, enablers or link workers. Given that many of the skills required for integrated care already exist within the workforce, it suggests the central question is how to use those skills more effectively to support boundary-spanning activities.