Guardian: Is Social Care about to be swallowed up by health

Buried in the NHS white paper is the detail that the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (Nice) should "extend its remit to social care". Does this signal the end of the institutional independence of social care?

Well, it's looking alarmingly like the end of the Social Care Institute for Excellence (Scie). Set up in 2001 to identify and spread good practice in the sector, the body has found its stride in recent years after a shaky start. But it now faces the loss to Nice of much of its government-funded work.

Paul Burstow, care services minister, told the Guardian that Nice should set quality standards for the whole of an individual's care experience. It made no sense for its remit to stop at the point on the care pathway at which responsibility for the individual passed from the NHS to social care.

Scie would "continue to have a role, but it won't be the same role they played directly alongside Nice in the past", Burstow said. "Some aspects of that role will transfer to Nice and we are in discussions with Scie about how that will be done."

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