Care in The Community - The Griffiths Report: 'Community Care: Agenda For Action'

The Griffiths Report: 'Community Care: Agenda For Action'

Sir Roy Griffiths had already been invited by Margaret Thatcher to produce a report on the problems of the NHS. This report was influenced by the ideology of managerialism. That is it was influenced by the idea that problems could be solved by 'management'. Griffiths firmly believed that many of the problems facing the Welfare State were caused by the lack of strong effective leadership and management. Because of this previous work, which was greatly admired by the Prime Minister, Griffiths was asked to examine the whole system of community care. In 1988 he produced a report or a Green Paper called 'Community Care: Agenda for Action', also known as The Griffiths Report.

Griffiths intended this plan to sort out the mess in 'no-man's land'. That is the grey area between health and social services. This area included the long term or continuing care of dependent groups such as older people, disabled and the mentally ill. In 1988 Griffiths said of community care that it was everybody's distant cousin but nobody's baby.

Basically he was saying that community care was not working because no one wanted to accept the responsibility for community care.

Community Care: Agenda for Action made six key recommendations for action:

1. Minister of State for Community Care to ensure implementation of the policy - it required ministerial authority.
2. Local Authorities should have key role in community care. i.e. Social Work / Services departments rather than Health have responsibility for long term and continuing care. Health Boards to have responsibility for primary and acute care.
3. Specific grant from central government to fund development of community care.
4. Specified what Social Service Departments should do: assess care needs of locality, set up mechanisms to assess care needs of individuals, on basis of needs - design 'flexible packages of care' to meet these needs
5. Promote the use of the Independent sector: this was to be achieved by social work departments collaborating with and making maximum use of the voluntary and private sector of welfare.
6. Social Services should be responsible for registration and inspection of all residential homes whether run by private organisations or the local authority.

The majority of long term care was already being provided by Social Services, but Griffiths' idea was to put community nursing staff under the control of local authority rather than Health Boards. This never actually happened. The Griffiths Report on Community Care seemed to back local government whereas, the health board reforms in the same period, actually strengthened central government control.