Making Norfolk the Best Place in England to Grow Old

Executive Summary

Norfolk is ageing faster than almost anywhere else in England. One in four residents is already aged 65 or over and by 2045 that will be almost three in ten, and North Norfolk is projected to have the oldest population of any local authority district in the country (Norfolk County Council, 2026a). For many, this appears as a distant projection, but it is already reshaping what Norfolk needs from its care system.

Adult social care's vacancy rate has fallen to its lowest level in a decade (Skills for Care, 2026), and Norfolk's own workforce has grown (Skills for Care, 2025a). Council spending on adult social care rises most years (Norfolk County Council, 2026b). Yet families still cannot always find available care, care professionals still cannot always fill their diaries with suitable work, and hospital beds are still filled with patients who are medically ready to go home but cannot leave, because the home care that would let them do so has not been arranged in time (Nuffield Trust, 2026).

As people live longer, the complexity of arranging their care rises steadily: more conditions, more medications, more services and more people involved in a single life. Arranging home care has become a genuinely difficult logistical and informational task, and the systems Norfolk relies on to manage it, built for a simpler and smaller job, have not kept pace.

This report argues that Norfolk’s defining home-care challenge is not only one of workforce supply and funding. It also arises from the growing complexity of arranging care and the system’s ability to convert available resources into deployable capacity: whether workers, providers, information and support can be identified, matched and mobilised around each person at the right place and time, with continuity protected even when plans and circumstances change.

Left unmanaged, the consequences can include missed visits, lost continuity, delayed hospital discharges, unpaid carers stretched beyond capacity, and vulnerable people exposed to avoidable risks.

The report sets out this framework, traces how the gap affects families, care professionals, the NHS and unpaid carers across Norfolk, and explains why the gap persists even as funding and workforce numbers slowly improve. It closes with a set of principles for coordinated care, illustrated by emerging models including Steadlo, a Norfolk-based platform, and a short blueprint for what Norfolk County Council, the NHS, providers and commissioners can do next.

As ageing increases complexity, efficient coordination will determine whether care is continuous, and whether outcomes are of the best quality. Norfolk will not become the best place in England to grow old by adding more care workers or more funding alone. It will do so by closing the coordination gap between them.

1. Why Norfolk, Why Now

Norfolk's population is ageing at a pace that is unusual even by the standards of an ageing country. Between 2025 and 2045, the county's population is projected to grow by around 109,000 people, and almost 78,000 of that increase, more than seven in every ten additional residents, will be aged 65 or over (Norfolk County Council, 2026a). Norfolk and Waveney already had the fourth highest proportion of residents aged 65 and over of any Integrated Care System area in England in 2022, a position it is projected to hold through 2045 (Norfolk County Council, 2026a).

View chart

Source: ONS population projections (last updated in 2025)

Residents by age	2024	2044	Change
0-4	40,500	40,200	Down by 1%
5-15	108,700	94,800	Down by 13%
16-65	574,000	622,200	Up by 8%
66-74	100,800	122,100	Up by 21%
75+	122,200	178,300	Up by 46%

Norfolk's population aged 85 and over is projected to double by 2041, reaching close to 61,000 people (Norfolk County Council, 2026a), and separate analysis for Norfolk's Joint Strategic Needs Assessment projects a 55 per cent increase in residents aged 75 and over by 2040 (Norfolk County Council, 2024). Within the county, this ageing is uneven. North Norfolk, already one of the most sparsely populated districts in England, is projected to have the oldest population of any local authority district in the country in both 2025 and 2045, measured by its old age dependency ratio. Norfolk as a whole is predominantly rural, and its older residents are concentrated precisely in the rural and coastal areas where the distance between one care visit and the next is longest (Norfolk County Council, 2026a).

Norfolk's own analysis of isolation and loneliness, published in December 2024, counted around 125,500 people living alone across the county, disproportionately in the older age groups most likely to experience loneliness (Norfolk County Council, 2024). To Norfolk's credit, the proportion of adults reporting loneliness in 2022/23 was significantly lower than the England average (Norfolk County Council, 2024). But a lower rate applied to a fast-growing older population still means rising absolute numbers of people who need not just care, but continuity of contact, and that is a demand curve the county cannot ignore.

People are living longer, but data has exposed the difference between living longer and living healthier at old age. A man in Norfolk can expect to live to around 80 and a woman to around 84, but healthy life expectancy, the years lived in good health, ends far earlier: around 62 to 63 for both sexes (Norfolk County Council, 2026a). That leaves close to two decades, on average, lived with one or more long-term conditions that require support to manage well. This gap, between how long Norfolk residents live and how long they live in good health, turns the demographic trend into a serious demand for efficient coordination system. Every extra year lived with reduced health is a year in which a family member, a care professional, a GP, a hospital and a council all have to help arrange the right support at the right time and keep arranging it as needs change.

Below are example estimates of the number of people in Norfolk in 2024 who had physical and personal care disabilities and mental health issues.

View chart

Sources: PANSI/POPPI, Psychiatric Morbidity Survey, ONS population estimates 2024

	Condition	Per cent	Estimated number of individuals in Norfolk
Disabilities	Moderate Physical Disability	13.1%	~123,500
Disabilities	Moderate Personal Care Disability	5.8%	~54,800
Disabilities	Severe Physical Disability	5.8%	~54,800
Disabilities	Serious Personal Care Disability	1.5%	~13,900
Mental Health Issues	Common Mental Disorder	13.9%	~131,000
Mental Health Issues	Self harm	5.5%	~51,900
Mental Health Issues	Suicide attempts ever	5.3%	~50,200
Mental Health Issues	Alcohol Dependence	3.2%	~30,300
Mental Health Issues	Illicit Drug Dependence	3.0%	~28,400
Mental Health Issues	Bipolar Disorder MDQ	1.5%	~13,700

Norfolk is experiencing, sooner and more intensely than most of England, a transition every part of the country will eventually face. What Norfolk builds now to manage rising complexity will be tested well before comparable counties need to build the same thing. That makes Norfolk a live test of what ageing well actually requires.

2. Home Care as Critical Infrastructure

Care is moving back to homes, where people really want to be.

In Norfolk, this is already happening at significant scale. The Council commissions more than 45,000 hours of home care each week, supporting over 3,300 people to live safely and independently in their own homes. In 2024/25, the council spent £71.6 million on commissioned home care, while more than 6,500 home-care roles were filled (Norfolk County Council, 2025). Together, these figures reflect the county’s growing reliance on home-based support.

The King's Fund's social care reform programme describes social care as essential infrastructure for a fair and functioning society, on a footing with the roads, energy networks and digital systems that the rest of the economy depends on (King's Fund, 2026b). Home care deserves the same status, for a specific reason that very little else in health and social care works properly without it.

As of the end of September 2025, around 11-13% of hospital bed days in England were occupied by medically fit patients, with roughly 12,500 beds full of such patients on a single day that month, at an estimated cost to the NHS of some £220 million (Health Foundation, 2025). In November 2025 alone, more than 291,000 hospital bed days were lost to delayed discharge, an average delay of nearly six days per affected patient, and the leading reason cited for the longest delays was the unavailability of, or hold-ups in arranging, bed-based rehabilitation, reablement and home-based recovery support (NHS England, 2025). The Nuffield Trust puts the underlying problem plainly: discharging patients to the right place at the right time requires a well coordinated system, and delays arise as much from constrained capacity outside hospital as from anything that happens inside it (Nuffield Trust, 2026). Home care as such, is a precondition for the NHS to function, and when it is hard to arrange quickly, the entire acute system backs up behind it.

The same logic runs through the rest of the system. Home care enables older and vulnerable people to remain independent rather than moving into residential care before they need to.

It is what allows unpaid carers, more than 81,500 of them in Norfolk alone (Norfolk County Council, 2024), to share the load of caring for someone rather than carrying it entirely on their own. Nationally, unpaid carers provide care valued at £184.3 billion a year (Carers UK, 2025a), and the exit of carers from paid work is estimated to cost the wider economy a further £37 billion annually (Carers UK, 2025b). Also, close to three million unpaid carers in England remain in paid employment alongside their caring role, while over a million more of working age are not (Carers UK, 2025b), an economic participation gap that widens whenever caring responsibilities intensify faster than the formal system around them, while supporting healthy ageing that keeps people contributing to their communities and, where they choose to, to paid work.

As the home becomes one of Norfolk’s principal settings for care, the county must become substantially better at coordinating available workers, providers, information and services around each person.

The question that remains is this: Does Norfolk have a system capable of connecting the care that exists with the people who need it, reliably, at the moment it is needed?

3. The Home Care Coordination Gap

Adult social care's vacancy rate has fallen to its lowest level in a decade, 6.2 per cent nationally in 2025/26 (Skills for Care, 2026), and Norfolk's own vacancy rate has tracked close to that figure for some time (Skills for Care, 2025a). The workforce has grown for four consecutive years (Skills for Care, 2026). Council spending on adult social care rises most years, and Norfolk County Council added a further £59 million to its adult social care budget in 2025/26 alone (Norfolk County Council, 2026b). None of this, on its own, has stopped families struggling to find available care, or stopped care professionals reporting that they cannot fill their diaries with suitable, well organised work, or corrected the exploitative working environments that many carers are subjected to.

This report finds that the missing ingredient is coordination: the capacity to connect the right people, the right information and the right services at the right time. As Norfolk's population ages, the complexity of arranging care for any one person rises steadily. A person with a single condition needs one kind of support, arranged once. A person with several long-term conditions, medications that interact, a family living some distance away and a care package that has to be flexible around hospital appointments and available workforce needs a constantly updated web of coordination between several people and organisations at once.

The widening space between that rising complexity and the system's inability to manage it, is what we call the Home Care Coordination Gap.

Where the gap is well managed, care remains continuous even as circumstances change.

Where it is not, the result is coordination failure: missed visits, sudden cancellations, frequent changes of care and oftentimes, exploitative working conditions. The mechanism behind the gap follows the logic that: Ageing increases complexity. Complexity increases the need for intelligent coordination that goes beyond availability to consider compatibility, continuity and changing needs. Coordination then shapes outcomes for the person, their family, the NHS and the care professional. Break the chain at the coordination link, and every stage downstream deteriorates. No external effort can fully compensate for a system that cannot connect care reliably.

4. Where the Gap Bites

The coordination gap shows up differently for each group coordinating home care, but the underlying cause is that no one in the system holds a complete, current, shared picture of who needs what, who is available, and what has already been tried. For families, the gap most often appears as absence in the middle of abundance. Norfolk has hundreds of registered care professionals and dozens of registered providers, yet families frequently cannot find available care that matches their relative's needs, location and preferred times. Age UK estimates that as many as two million older people in England are not receiving the care they need (Age UK, 2024a), a scale of unmet need that coexists, uncomfortably, with a workforce that is growing and a vacancy rate at a ten year low (Skills for Care, 2026). Nationally, more than 400,000 people were waiting for a care assessment, a service to begin, or a review of an existing care plan as of mid-2026, and two in three councils saw providers close, cease trading or hand back contracts in the six months to May 2026 alone, with home care providers affected in 44 per cent of council areas (Association of Directors of Adult Social Services, 2026).

Each handback is a family whose continuity of care has been broken with no guaranteed mechanism to pick it back up quickly.

For older people themselves, the Home Care Coordination Gap carries a direct health and safety cost. Age UK finds that nine in ten older people who are often lonely also report being unhappy or depressed, compared with four in ten of those who are rarely lonely. Without effective action, 1.2 million people aged over 65 in England could often feel lonely by 2034 (Age UK, 2024b). The health consequences are well established. Loneliness and poor social relationships are associated with a 29% increase in the risk of coronary heart disease and a 32% increase in stroke risk (Valtorta et al., 2016). A meta-analysis covering more than 600,000 people also found loneliness associated with a 31% higher risk of all-cause dementia (Luchetti et al., 2024).

The risks are also immediate. NICE warns that late or missed home-care visits can cause distress, undermine trust and have serious consequences for health and wellbeing, particularly for people living alone or lacking capacity (NICE, 2015). Falls make the consequences equally visible. More than 200,000 emergency hospital admissions among people aged 65 and over were attributed to falls in England in 2023/24, with most falls occurring in the home (Department of Health and Social Care, 2026b). A delayed visit can leave someone without planned support for transferring, toileting or moving around the home.

A coordination system that repeatedly changes the person entering someone’s home weakens one of care’s most important protective assets: a trusted relationship with someone who knows what is normal for that individual. The consequences are likely to be greatest in Norfolk’s rural and coastal communities, where older residents are most concentrated and access to neighbours, shops, transport and other forms of support is more limited (Norfolk County Council, 2026a).

For care professionals, the gap shows up as inefficiency rather than absence. Domiciliary care's vacancy rate, 9.7 per cent nationally, runs more than double the rate in residential care (King's Fund, 2026a), Norfolk home care sector has a workforce vacancy rate of 14.9 per cent, also around twice the national average (Norfolk County Council, 2025). Around two in five home care organisations change their care professionals' schedules every week, undermining the continuity that both clients and workers value (Homecare Association, 2026), and care workers can spend close to a fifth of their working day travelling between appointments that were not planned with travel time in mind (UNISON, 2023). None of this is primarily a pay or recruitment problem; it is what happens when scheduling, matching and communication are handled manually, or by systems that do not talk to one another.

For the NHS, the gap is measured in beds. A government breakdown has attributed around a quarter of delayed discharges to patients waiting specifically for home care to be arranged, a larger share than the 16 per cent waiting for a care home place (NHS England, 2025). NHS Norfolk and Suffolk Integrated Care Board, established in April 2026, now carries this pressure across a combined population of 1.7 million, with local schemes such as HomeFirst aiming to arrange home based support quickly enough to prevent unnecessary hospital stays. Their success depends less on how many care packages exist in Norfolk than on how fast the right one can be found and started for a specific person on a specific day.

For unpaid carers, the gap is absorbed personally. Norfolk has around 81,500 unpaid carers (Norfolk County Council, 2024), and nationally 62% of carers say they took on the role because no other care option was available to them, not because they actively chose it (Carers UK, 2025a). Just 14% of carers report being asked about their own capacity to provide care as part of a hospital discharge decision, despite carers having a legal right to be consulted under the Health and Care Act 2022, and 44% say the person they care for had an emergency or unplanned hospital admission in the past year (Carers UK, 2025a). Every gap the legacy system fails to close becomes, by default, a gap an unpaid carer is expected to fill, often at real cost to their own health, income and working life.

5. Why the Gap Persists

The home care coordination gap persists for structural reasons that money and headcount have failed to fix.

Nationally, the number of CQC regulated domiciliary care organisations grew from 13,733 to more than 15,000 in the single year to March 2025 (Skills for Care, 2025b). This has created a healthy competition, which in normal circumstances should improve quality. But it also multiplies the number of separate systems, contracts, spreadsheets and phone calls that must be reconciled every time a family, a hospital or a council tries to arrange care.

No single organisation in Norfolk, public or private, currently holds a complete, live view of which care professionals are free, which families need support, and where the two could be matched.

Commissioning has not kept pace with the cost of coordinated delivery. Councils' average price for an hour of home care has risen to £25.05 for 2026/27, well below the £34.42 that the Homecare Association calculates providers need to cover National Living Wage pay, statutory costs and sustainable delivery, including the unpaid travel time between visits described above (Homecare Association, 2026). When the commissioned rate does not cover the coordination work that reliable care actually requires, that work either does not happen, or it is quietly absorbed by care professionals and unpaid carers instead. Norfolk County Council, like most councils, now faces a widening budget gap of its own, projected at £41.6 million for 2026/27 and rising over subsequent years, driven substantially by demand in adult social care (Norfolk County Council, 2026b); more funding would definitely help, but the gap this report describes would not close on funding alone.

Information about a single person's care remains scattered by design. Assessments, care plans, medication records, family contact details and provider schedules typically sit in separate systems that were never built to share data with one another, so every point of handover, hospital to home, one provider to another, one care professional to their replacement, is a point where information is often lost. The King's Fund has described the space where health and social care meet as a "no man's land" in which poor coordination, fragmented services and unclear responsibility produce gaps, delays and worse experiences for exactly this reason (King's Fund, 2026c). The gaps persist because coordination is being performed manually, on WhatsApp groups, person by person, inside a system of rising complexity that has outgrown what manual coordination can reliably hold together.

6. Closing the Gap: Principles for Coordinated Care

Closing the Home Care Coordination Gap requires building coordination capability as a distinct piece of infrastructure in its own right, alongside investment in pay, training and provider sustainability.

Four principles follow from the analysis in this report. a. Coordination needs a live, shared view. Families, providers, care professionals, hospitals and councils need visibility into the same current information, who is available, who needs support, what has already been arranged and what has changed, rather than each holding a partial and quickly outdated version of the picture. b. Continuity must be protected by design. When a care professional cancels, a provider closes, or a family's circumstances change suddenly, there should be a fast, structured way to find alternative and suitable support, rather than a gap that a family or an unpaid carer has to fill by default. c. Matching needs to account for more than availability. Personality, familiarity location, travel time and the specific needs of the person receiving care all affect whether an arrangement holds. Better matching at the point of introduction reduces the churn that later shows up as missed visits and lost continuity. This aligns with the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence's own guideline, which recommends that older people using home care see familiar workers wherever possible and that service contracts allow enough travel time between visits (National Institute for Health and Care Excellence, 2015), a standard that companies such as Steadlo Ltd are built to meet consistently. d. Technology should support relationships, not replace them. The goal of better coordination is not fewer people involved in care; it is making sure the people involved, family members, care professionals and unpaid carers, spend their time and attention on care itself rather than on the logistics of arranging it.

Norfolk already has examples of coordination infrastructure being built along these lines. NHS Norfolk and Suffolk's HomeFirst scheme applies a version of this thinking to hospital discharge specifically, prioritising fast, appropriate home-based support to prevent unnecessary bed days.

In the independent sector, platforms such as Steadlo, which automates care coordination, by connecting families across Norfolk with verified, care professionals in real-time, bringing verification, matching, scheduling and monitoring into one system, with capabilities that detects disruptions and reassigns to the next best professionals when a placement breaks down, illustrate how technology can strengthen coordination between people rather than substitute for the relationships involved.

These solutions are evidence that purpose-built coordination infrastructure is possible, and that Norfolk, by investing in people and investing in the systems can become the best place to grow old in England.

7. A Blueprint for Norfolk: Building the Coordination Infrastructure

As care moves rapidly into people’s homes, Norfolk needs an operating layer capable of connecting demand, workforce capacity, information and decisions across organisational boundaries. The Council and NHS Norfolk and Suffolk Integrated Care Board should, therefore, treat care coordination infrastructure as a shared commissioning priority.

1. Commissioning rates and contract design should recognise the work required to make care reliable. This includes appropriate travel time, compatible matching, stable scheduling, transparent communication with families, information sharing and contingency planning. Providers should not be expected to absorb these activities while being measured principally on the number of hours delivered.

Contracts should include explicit outcomes for continuity and recovery. These should measure the proportion of visits delivered by a person’s familiar team, the number of different care professionals entering the home, missed and late visits, the speed with which threatened care is detected and recovered, and the time between discharge readiness and the start of support at home. Commissioning more activity without measuring whether care remains connected risks purchasing volume while leaving reliability unchanged.

2. Norfolk should invest in technology that makes care capacity visible and usable across the county. This requires shared standards and interoperable systems through which authorised information about needs, skills, compatibility, availability, location and risk can move securely between the organisations responsible for care.

Norfolk needs systems that can identify suitable capacity, match people according to skills, compatibility, preferences and proximity, construct workable schedules, communicate changes and recover care when the original arrangements fail. Without these functions, the county may have care workers in aggregate while families and discharge teams remain unable to find the right person at the required time. Steadlo is one locally developed example of this emerging coordination infrastructure. The system brings verification, intelligent matching, scheduling, communication, payments and continuity recovery into a connected workflow. Its development, supported by the University of East Anglia and Norfolk County Council, gives Norfolk an opportunity to test a model designed around the county’s own care market and geography.

3. The next step should be to move from supporting innovation at the margins to testing it within real care pathways. Steadlo and comparable models should be given structured opportunities to work with council-commissioned services, direct-payment users, self-funding families and hospital-discharge pathways. These pilots should operate within clear requirements for safeguarding, information governance, accessibility, workforce fairness and human oversight. Their results should be independently evaluated, and technologies that demonstrate improved access, continuity, recovery and value should have a credible route into commissioning and procurement.

Care professionals should be encouraged and involved in the design of coordination systems from the outset. Much of the care delivery already depends on their judgement, relationships and local knowledge. Technology should make that knowledge easier to use.

Families should be given a current, accessible view of their care arrangements, including who is expected, when they are due, and real time view of ongoing care and they should never be expected to become the recovery mechanism when formal arrangements fail.

Conclusion: Making Norfolk the Best Place in England to Grow Old

Norfolk is growing older faster than most of England, we can neither change the pace of ageing nor the distance separating one care visit from the other. But we can control how effectively its care system responds.

As care moves into people’s homes, reliability will depend not only on the number of workers or providers available, but on the County’s ability to connect the right person, information and support at the right time and place.

The consequences of this coordination gap are already visible in delayed starts, disrupted continuity, inefficient travel, worker burnout, repeated assessments and families carrying responsibilities that should belong to the system.

Norfolk County Council should now treat coordination infrastructure as a commissioning priority, investing in shared standards, better information flow and technologies. Locally developed systems such as Steadlo should be tested within real care pathways, evaluated against clear outcomes and commissioned where they demonstrate value.

The Council already has much of what it needs in thousands of care professionals, strong public institutions and a growing technology sector. The task now is to connect these assets into a system that works reliably around each person.

If Norfolk is to become the best place in England to grow old, care at home must be available at the right time, in the right place, and delivered by a care professional matched to the person's needs and personality.

References

• Age UK (2024a) 2 Million Older People Now Have Some Unmet Need for Social Care. 26 September. Available at: https://www.ageuk.org.uk/latest-press/articles/2-million-older-people-now-have-some-unmet-need-for-social-care/ (opens in a new tab) (Accessed: 19 July 2026).
• Age UK (2024b) You Are Not Alone in Feeling Lonely. 3 December. Available at: https://www.ageuk.org.uk/latest-press/articles/age-uks-new-report-shows-you-are-not-alone-in-feeling-lonely/ (opens in a new tab) (Accessed: 19 July 2026).
• Association of Directors of Adult Social Services (ADASS) (2026) Spring Survey 2026. 14 July.
• Carers UK (2025a) State of Caring 2025: The Cost of Caring – The Impact of Caring Across Carers' Lives. 21 October. Available at: https://www.carersuk.org/reports/state-of-caring-2025-the-cost-of-caring-the-impact-of-caring-across-carers-lives/ (opens in a new tab) (Accessed: 19 July 2026).
• Carers UK (2025b) Key Facts and Figures. Available at: https://www.carersuk.org/policy-and-research/key-facts-and-figures/ (opens in a new tab) (Accessed: 19 July 2026).
• Casey Commission (2026) Independent Commission on Adult Social Care. Available at: https://caseycommission.co.uk/ (opens in a new tab) (Accessed: 19 July 2026).
• Health Foundation (2025) Delayed Discharges from Hospital: Comparing Performance This Year and Last. December.
• Homecare Association (2026) Response to the ADASS Spring Survey 2026 and CQC Local Authority Assessment Findings. Available at: https://www.homecareassociation.org.uk/resource/homecare-association-responds-to-adass-spring-survey-2026-and-cqc-local-authority-assessment-findings.html (opens in a new tab) (Accessed: 19 July 2026).
• King's Fund (2026a) Social Care 360: Workforce and Carers. Available at: https://www.kingsfund.org.uk/insight-and-analysis/long-reads/social-care-360-workforce-carers (opens in a new tab) (Accessed: 19 July 2026).
• King's Fund (2026b) Turning Insight into Action: Reforming Social Care. Available at: https://www.kingsfund.org.uk/insight-and-analysis/projects/turning-insight-action-reforming-social-care (opens in a new tab) (Accessed: 19 July 2026).
• King's Fund (2026c) 'No Man's Land': The Experience of Patients at the Interface Between Health and Social Care. 2 June. Available at: https://www.kingsfund.org.uk/insight-and-analysis/long-reads/experience-patients-interface-health-social-care (opens in a new tab) (Accessed: 19 July 2026).
• King's Fund, National Voices, Healthwatch England and Ipsos (2026d) Still Lost in the System: The Urgent Need for Better NHS Admin. April.
• Luchetti, M. et al. (2024) 'A meta-analysis of loneliness and risk of dementia using longitudinal data from >600,000 individuals', Nature Mental Health, 2, pp. 1350–1361.
• National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) (2015) Home Care: Delivering Personal Care and Practical Support to Older People Living in Their Own Homes. NICE guideline NG21. Available at: https://www.nice.org.uk/guidance/ng21 (opens in a new tab) (Accessed: 19 July 2026).
• NHS England (2025) Delayed Discharges (Acute) Statistics and Daily Discharge Situation Reports.
• NHS Norfolk and Suffolk Integrated Care Board (2026) New NHS Norfolk and Suffolk Integrated Care Board to be Established on 1 April 2026. Available at: https://suffolkandnortheastessex.icb.nhs.uk/news/new-nhs-norfolk-and-suffolk-integrated-care-board-to-be-established-on-1-april-2026/ (opens in a new tab) (Accessed: 19 July 2026).
• Norfolk County Council (2024) Joint Strategic Needs Assessment: Social Isolation and Loneliness. Norfolk Insight, December.
• Norfolk County Council (2026a) Joint Strategic Needs Assessment: Population. Norfolk Insight. Available at: https://www.norfolkinsight.org.uk/jsna/population/ (opens in a new tab) (Accessed: 19 July 2026).
• Norfolk County Council (2026b) Budget Factsheet 2025-29 and Budget Consultation 2026-27.
• Nuffield Trust (2026) Delayed Discharges from Hospital. Available at: https://www.nuffieldtrust.org.uk/resource/delayed-discharges-from-hospital (opens in a new tab) (Accessed: 19 July 2026).
• Skills for Care (2025a) A Summary of the Adult Social Care Sector and Workforce in Norfolk, 2024/25. Available at: https://www.skillsforcare.org.uk/Adult-Social-Care-Workforce-Data/workforceintelligence/resources/Reports/Local/2025/Eastern/Norfolk-Summary.pdf (opens in a new tab) (Accessed: 19 July 2026).
• Skills for Care (2025b) Domiciliary Care Services in the Adult Social Care Sector, 2024/25. Available at: https://www.skillsforcare.org.uk/Adult-Social-Care-Workforce-Data/workforceintelligence/resources/Reports/National/Summary-of-domiciliary-care-services-2025.pdf (opens in a new tab) (Accessed: 19 July 2026).
• Skills for Care (2026) The Size and Structure of the Adult Social Care Sector and Workforce in England, 2025-26. Available at: https://www.skillsforcare.org.uk/sizeandstructure (opens in a new tab) (Accessed: 19 July 2026).
• UNISON (2023) Majority of Homecare Staff are Unpaid for Travel Between Visits. 15 June. Available at: https://www.unison.org.uk/news/2023/06/majority-of-homecare-staff-are-unpaid-for-travel-between-visits-says-unison/ (opens in a new tab) (Accessed: 19 July 2026).
• Valtorta, N.K., Kanaan, M., Gilbody, S., Ronzi, S. and Hanratty, B. (2016) 'Loneliness and social isolation as risk factors for coronary heart disease and stroke: systematic review and meta-analysis of longitudinal observational studies', Heart, 102(13), pp. 1009–1016.
• Department of Health and Social Care (2026b) Housing and health in local strategic health planning. Available at: GOV.UK (Accessed: 20 July 2026).
• National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) (2015) Home care: delivering personal care and practical support to older people living in their own homes. NICE guideline NG21. Available at: NICE (Accessed: 20 July 2026).