joint planning

This guidance is designed to direct commissioners to resources and guidance which will assist them in commissioning interventions to reduce alcohol-related harm in their local community. It offers ways to improve commissioning, looking at each World Class Commissioning competency and all stages in the commissioning cycle. Contents include: why a focus on alcohol-related harm?; commissioning to improve the outcome for people at risk of alcohol related harm; World Class Commissioning Competencies and the commissioning cycle.

Document bringing together best practice and aspirations to form eleven sets of good practice standards, which can be utilised as an audit tool and guide by all those involved in adult protection work.

This study of older people's mental health services assessed available national data and visited specialist mental health trusts. The interview tool covered questions relation to several of the core standards used by the Healthcare Commission to assess trusts' performance. The key findings are reported in four main themes: age discrimination, the quality of inpatient care, the comprehensiveness of services; and working with other organisations (how specialist services worked with primary care, adult social services and acute hospitals).

The government here welcomes the Houghton report, accepts its main recommendation that helping people to find and stay in work should be a local government priority, and describes the support put in place, strengthened integration and greater devolution, a challenge to local partnerships and support for the third sector and social enterprise. An annex summarises government response to Houghton and DWP's devolution offer.