16,000 hours per WEEK missed by stretched carers

NEARLY 16,000 hours of carer appointments are missed every week because of staff shortages, it has been revealed.

Elderly people are being left in bed all day or are unable to go the toilet for hours because their carers do not turn up as promised.

An ITV News investigation found that in a single week last year, 15,858 hours of social care commissioned by local authorities were not delivered.

Eighty-eight per cent of councils in England that responded to a Freedom of Information request said they did not deliver all of the social care they had promised.

Reasons for missed visits included agency staff shortages, sickness and delays, and occasions when the care receiver refused help or was away from home. In Oxfordshire, during the week 5 to 9 December, 1,559 hours of appointments for 141 people were not carried out. In Northamptonshire 1,075 hours were unmet, while in Wakefield it was 953 hours.

The investigation comes after a separate report yesterday found hundreds of thousands of elderly people are not getting the help they need to get out of bed, dress or eat.

The study from Age UK found a massive drop in the number of people eligible for social care, leaving many to fend for themselves or relying on loved ones. More than 200,000 people across England are thought to receive no help with bathing despite needing it, while more than 140,000 get no assistance with getting in and out of bed and more than 400,000 have no help with dressing.

Some 24,000 need help with eating but don’t receive it, while more than 78,000 are left with no help getting to the toilet. Almost 2.3million people aged 65 and over have difficulty with at least one activity of daily living, the report said, but 1.2million do not receive the support they need.

This represents an 18 per cent increase on last year and a 48 per cent rise since 2010. In 2005/06, 15.3 per cent of older people received social care support but this dropped to 9.2 per cent in 2013/14.

The report also warned that England was living on ‘borrowed time in saving social care for older people’.

Caroline Abrahams, Age UK’s charity director, said: ‘Our new report makes for frightening reading because it shows just how fragile older people’s social care now is.

‘Even worse, unless something changes, the crisis will certainly deepen this year and next, and we think there is now a real risk of a complete collapse in social care in the worst affected areas.

‘If this happened it would be a disaster that would threaten the health and even the lives of the older people affected.’ The charity wants an ‘emergency injection of funds’ into social care in the upcoming Budget.