Costing Community Care, with Particular Reference to Mental Health

The title for the conference has caused me a little dissonance. In the mental health field, which is the focus for this presentation, Ministers announced earlier in the year that care in the community is to be ‘scrapped’. As a result of what they perceive to be the ‘failure’ of the system of support, the previous Government’s policy of community-based mental health care is no longer to be given the same emphasis or encouragement. Of course, comments from Ministers of this kind have sometimes been known to owe rather more to political rhetoric than to the realities of experiences on the ground. Nevertheless, they certainly help to focus our minds on the effectiveness of community care, particularly for people with enduring problems, and on whether scarce public resources are efficiently used.