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Successive policy documents concerning older people's health and well‐being have aimed to improve their care, by raising standards and promoting independence. These policies also emphasise the need for research to prevent disability, and reduce admission to hospitals and long‐term care settings. This paper reports an evaluation in progress of a health technology approach designed to achieve these objectives. An ‘expert system’ is described that is intended to improve older people's access to health and social care information, to enable service providers to review the health and social care needs of older people, and to allow planners to assess the needs of whole populations. The paper ends by inviting discussion and responses from readers of this journal.

There have been few economic evaluations of joint working between social and health care. This paper focuses on collaboration between professionals providing care for people aged 75 and over, and examines the economic costs of contacts made by social workers with community nurses, GPs and older people or their carers. Two areas were studied, one where social care and primary care services were co‐located, and the other with social work teams located separately from local health services. The two forms of social care location had an impact on contacts and costs but overall it was fairly small. Contact costs made up only a small amount of the overall costs of care These findings suggest that altering the organisational arrangements for care delivery may improve the process of care delivery, but result in only minor changes to the proportion of overall resources directed to older service users.

Behavioural and psychological symptoms of dementia (BPSD) are a far too common and disturbing occurrence for people with dementia, their families and those who care for them. The consequences can be not only devastating personally and challenging professionally, but also costly for service providers. In this, the fourth of this series on older people's mental health services, we describe what BPSD are, what we know about current service provision for this group and the gaps, and how commissioners might approach these issues when developing services for older people with dementia.

Mental health problems in later life are common and damaging experiences for individuals, their families and those who support them. Some become almost the defining feature of the older person and, while they are challenging professionally and costly for society, they are also influenced by the twin discriminations of stigma and ageism. In this, the last in our series on older people's mental health, we pull together some other key messages from the series and set them in the context of current and future service commissioning and provision. We point to remaining gaps in provision and suggest how commissioners might approach the problems of mental ill‐health in later life in a context of declining resources.

Mental health problems in old age have attracted policy attention in the UK over the past decade. An important issue is how to improve services for people who have both mental health and other problems. This article sets out some of the challenges facing planners and commissioners in developing integrated services for older adults, by using the case study of people with dementia and incontinence problems. It uses integrated service models and observations from the EVIDEM‐C study to suggest some incremental actions that would help develop the long‐term strategy for integrated services.