Understanding Health and Social Care by Jon Glasby is a welcome Third Edition of a book from the well-established Understanding Welfare Series published by Policy Press in association with the Social Policy Association and as such is primarily targeted at social science undergraduates and those on relevant professional training courses. The emphasis is upon health and social care for adults rather than children and also more upon community health rather than all aspects of health care, although tensions between hospital care and community health/social care around issues such as hospital discharge are also well covered. The book is organised as is the norm within the series through early chapters looking at origins and then current services, followed by chapters exploring key concepts. The concepts chosen are i) partnership working, ii) independent living, iii) anti-discriminatory practice, iv) user involvement and v) support for carers.

This is a challenging undertaking but one that the author mainly manages to pull off with style and panache. A huge amount of information is presented to the reader about the UK's complex health and social care arrangements and this is achieved in a very clear and accessible way with the sections on partnership working being particularly impressive. In the Introduction Glasby identifies the primary aim of the book as being to provide practical material to support the conceptual knowledge of social policy students and conceptual material to underpin the emergent practice of professional students. He acknowledges how hard it is to please both audiences in terms of getting the balance right but my own view is that he gets as close to this as anyone is ever likely to. This positive outcome is greatly helped by the thoughtful way the reflection exercises have been put together at the end of chapters so as to appeal to both these different audiences.

Nevertheless there is still something of an inevitable tension around how much detail to offer on policy and practice developments when word length has to be kept under control. The very reasonable solution used is the regular use of bullet points to enable ‘the story’ to be moved forward at speed. For example, the key policies of New Labour's ‘third way’ are outlined with six bullet points with each describing one of these policies in one or two sentences (pp. 76–77). However, there is a danger that narrative coherence can start to dissipate resulting in the main points made becoming lost by social science or professional students not familiar with the topic under discussion. I feel this edition just about gets away with this, especially given the textbook element of the endeavour. However, my hope would be that the very likely Fourth Edition will avoid the temptation to lengthen the bullet points even further (to reflect yet more initiatives); instead, I hope it will carry out some difficult pruning.

Perhaps the most uncomfortable aspect of the book relates to how best to cover the impact of devolution of the UK's health and social care systems. It is claimed the book takes ‘a UK focus’ (p. 7) but then goes on to admit ‘many of the specific organisational structures cited are those in place in an English setting’ (p. 8). This is indeed almost exclusively the case, with the short paragraphs on partnership working in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland (pp. 78–79) being the main exception. This will almost certainly make this a frustrating book at times for readers whose UK reference point is not England. In making this criticism I do accept that it is far easier to outline the weakness than to come up with a clear solution that avoids over-complicating the overall book.

I was also disappointed that the housing dimension of community health and social care received so little attention. I would have expected more focus on this crucial dimension in the discussion of underpinning concepts (the assumption that ordinary housing can provide a home in a way that institutions cannot) but also with regard to specific topics such as hospital discharge (pp. 86–87) and independent living (pp. 95–118). A recent report from Care & Repair England, which was underpinned by extensive data analysis by the Building Research Establishment, estimated that poor housing costs the NHS £1.4 billion per annum with issues relating to older people dominating the bill (Adams, Reference Adam2016). The very appropriate title of the report was ‘Off the Radar’!

However, these gripes have to be balanced against the fact this book has so much to offer social science students and those on training courses. It is therefore only fair to conclude with the great merits of the book overall. The Third Edition manages to convey the continuing impact of the legislative divide initially created in the 1940s between health care and social care. It communicates how policy makers and practitioners are struggling to make these two parallel systems work coherently at a time when austerity cuts are generating a growing dislocation between policy rhetoric and the reality on the ground. The short Postscript at the end of the book notes that the main response to this seems to remain evolution (even if evolution at a frantic pace) rather than a revolutionary review of the whole system. Glasby's last words are ‘the context is getting harder’ (p. 182) for those trying desperately to make it all work and it is difficult to believe that the outcome of the June 2017 General Election will do anything to ease this worrying situation.