Prevention and social care for older people in Wales: reflections from a research study

Prevention has increasingly become a central principle for health and care services across the UK. Legislatively this is evident in The Care Act 2014 in England or the Social Services and Well-being (Wales) Act 2014; each making prevention a statutory obligation for governments to enact. Yet, recent research has highlighted how this legislative drive incorporates a ‘definitional slipperiness’[1] that sees prevention linked to multiple agendas all at once: individual well-being; system partnership working; community development and resilience; statutory cost-saving, and financial imperatives, to name a few. Not all these agendas sit easily alongside one another, though, meaning that there is scope for multiple parallel interpretations of prevention[2] particularly in the social care context, and for older people.