Evidence Submission: New Types of Social Care Workers

The New Types of Worker Programme (NToW) was piloted under the previous Labour government. The initiative was part of a government agenda to further integrate health and social care services, by developing a workforce that had transferrable skills to work in both areas.

The Department of Health funded a pilot scheme consisting of 28 locations in England from 2003-2006. The NToW programme evaluation was commissioned and conducted approximately two years after the programme began. The evaluation design was limited by the requirement to complete the evaluation within three months.

The Making the Most of Evaluation research group has revisited the evaluation and its findings in this report. It found that the evaluation was limited in scope by its short deadlines and failed to demonstrate that the programme met the targets set by the Department of Health, other than just trialling innovative types of working. The outcome measures for innovation however were not developed, which meant that the evaluation was not able to provide anything more that an impressionistic view of innovations in workforce development.

The current coalition government is also interested in this policy area. Given the weaknesses in this evaluation, it will not able to draw strong conclusions about the NToW programme, which offered a possible effective strategy to advance health and social care integration.

Click here to read the report in full and you can read the summary report of all the reviews here.