Responding to a new report by The Health Foundation about why fundamental reform of social care funding in England should be a priority, Saffron Cordery, deputy chief executive, NHS Providers, said:

"Inadequate funding for social care has a huge effect on people's health and wellbeing and on the NHS.

"The NHS works extremely closely with severely overstretched social care services, whether they are providing care for people in their homes or in the community. Every day thousands of people are stuck in hospital beds when they could be recovering at or closer to home, often because there isn't enough social care capacity.

"Social care needs serious political attention, meaningful reform and long-term, sustainable funding to address huge amounts of unmet and undermet need, quality of care and chronic workforce shortages."