Working together: lessons for collaboration between health and social services

The recent community care reforms have placed a high premium on interagency collaboration between health and social care agencies to ensure the delivery of high quality services to users. An examination of the historical record reveals the problematic nature of such activity. This paper provides a review of this record and then illustrates contemporary inter-agency issues through an analysis of a local experiment in joint service delivery in Leeds (UK). The paper's examination of the literature on joint working provides some clues as to why the experiment's original aims and objectives remained largely unrealized. The difficulties encountered by the key actors were a mix of cultural, professional and organizational factors.