Social care as a first-class citizen

The second edition of ISO 13940 is the product of extensive international work to bring social care fully inside the concept system, so that integrated care can be modelled — and delivered — without a semantic seam between sectors.

The standard grounds itself in the World Health Organization's understanding of health as physical, mental, and social well-being. On that footing, clinical care and social care are treated as two forms of the same endeavour — influencing, restoring, and maintaining health — and the common term care is used deliberately to stress what they share. The persistent assumption that healthcare means only clinical action against physical and mental problems is exactly the misunderstanding the model is designed to correct.

Where the social care work came from

The extension is not an afterthought. Following research published in 2016–2017 on integrating social and clinical care, a working group at UNINFO — the ICT standardisation branch of the Italian national body UNI — set out to build a concept system for continuity of care in social care, and for collaboration across social and clinical provision, using the first edition of ContSys as its base. The result, technical report UNI/TR 11802:2020, was then carried into the international standard: the 2026 edition explicitly extends the system of concepts across social and clinical care, building on that work.

Social concepts throughout the model

Social care now runs through every concept area rather than sitting in an annexe:

Figure 1. Clinical and social care meeting in an integrated care plan
Clinical and social care meeting in an integrated care planDiagram showing clinical care plans and social care plans as specialisations of care plan, with an integrated care plan crossing organisational, professional, and contextual borders to address physical, mental, and social needs together. ONE FAMILY OF CARE PLANS Care plan a dynamic, personalised plan of needed care activities, care goals and intended outcomes for identified health needs Clinical care plan a care plan addressing clinical issues Social care plan a care plan addressing social issues Integrated care plan one care plan crossing organisational, professional and contextual borders physical needs mental needs social needs Clinical and social care plans give each sector rigour; an integrated care plan gives the subject of care one joined-up plan.

The practical benefit is felt at every transition: a hospital discharge involving both clinical and social care personnel, a referral from a GP into community support, or long-term institutional care that spans both sectors can all be described — and their information exchanged — in one vocabulary.