'A quality strategy for social care'

In 2000, building on the Modernising social services white paper (1998), the government's A quality strategy for social care set out a number of actions to improve the quality of services.

The strategy floated the prospect of a new body, the Social Care Institute for Excellence (SCIE), which was intended to promote quality and drive improvement in social care services by gathering and sharing good practice in social care with the aim of reducing variation nationally.

It was envisaged that SCIE would establish and develop a knowledge base, provide guidelines on effective practices and create partnerships across organisations in:

• research
• training
• regulation
• monitoring
• commissioning and provision of social care.

The government established the SCIE in 2001.

The strategy also set out plans to establish a national framework that would promote excellence in social care services. The original conception was that SCIE would produce the evidence-based guidance. The National Care Standards Commission would inspect services against that guidance, as well as national minimum standards.

A version of this model was achieved once the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) began to produce quality standards on social care from 2013 onwards.