As part of the Foundation’s programme of work on redesigning social care for older people, the Foundation invited five groups of experts, each with their own specialist perspectives on care, to come together to discuss the vision and architecture for a future care system in July 2008. Each group was tasked with designing a new architecture for a care system for older people, which would be able to achieve a better vision of care, based on principles such as independence, choice, clarity and consistency, wellbeing and prevention. In October 2008, the Foundation brought these experts back together in four larger mixed groups to present the elements of a Vision for Care, which the Foundation created based on the original groups’ discussions, and research carried out over the summer. Experts were asked to consider the Vision for Care in general terms, and discuss its value as a concept and framework for care reform and to consider more specifically the question of who might have responsibility for each of the elements in a future care system. There emerged a number of potential conflicts and synergies from this discussion. The Foundation also presented the findings from its summer research programme, which explored four of the six elements of the Vision in more depth, and invited experts to comment.
