Introduction

Most of the partnerships discussed in this book are relationships between organisations. One aim of such partnerships is to move towards the integration of the different services provided by each organisation in order to achieve more holistic and coordinated services for users. Achieving this integration often involves new, closer ways of working between different professionals, for example, through the creation of multi-professional teams. Different interpretations of teamworking and membership have important implications for the kinds of services that are delivered and the degree of service integration that can be achieved. The way in which partnership between organisations is played out in inter-professional relationships can therefore be of critical importance to the nature of the service integration that is achieved.

This chapter explores inter-professional partnerships between primary healthcare and social care in front-line service delivery, through an analysis of the WellFamily service. This service involves a partnership between NHS primary healthcare services and a voluntary organisation, the Family Welfare Association (FWA), with the aim of responding adequately and in a more integrated way to health and social care needs than traditional statutory services. For the WellFamily workers, the practice of partnership required their membership of the primary health care team (PHCT), in order to provide an integrated service that could meet users’ combined health and social needs. We examine the different meanings given to the concept of the ‘team’ by the various professionals involved in the partnership and the conditions for achieving team integration, in order to identify some of the implications for the future of health–social care partnerships.

The problem of the separation of health services and social services dates back to the inception of the NHS and has resulted in repeated calls for ‘integration’, with attempts to bring this about through, for example, projects attaching social workers to GP surgeries (Lymbery and Millward, 2000). Such initiatives were given renewed impetus in the early 1990s in relation to services for older people by the implementation of community care legislation (Lymbery, 1998). Most of these initiatives involved partnership between two statutory organisations; GP services and social services. The aim of such partnerships could be characterised as bringing about closer collaboration between two distinct services, with individual professionals retaining separate organisational, as well as professional, identities, while working together more closely both in terms of location and communication.