SCANDAL OF MY SISTER EMBARRASSES US ALL
He served in Blair Cabinet that vowed no one should sell their home to pay for care. In a very personal account, DAVID BLUNKETT admits our ruling class has failed us
Just over ten years ago, I received a note from then Labour Health secretary Alan Johnson kindly asking if I would attend the launch of his groundbreaking plan to resolve the dementia care crisis.
He knew I was an ardent critic of what was then the care system, which hung dementia patients out to dry, and that I would support his demand for a £ 150 million pot from the treasury which could be used to boost dementia services.
It was an admirable demand — one that, in 2009, we felt was long overdue. If you had told me then that our rotting dementia care system would remain untreated, I would have laughed you out of the room.
Even in the late seventies, when I chaired the social services committee of sheffield City Council, we were aware our country’s dementia care system was woefully inadequate.
At Johnson’s policy launch, he asked me to speak but, thanks to some mix up, mistakenly introduced me as the vice-president of the Alzheimer’s society. It turned out to be a fortunate error, however, as afterwards the organisation’s chief executive actually sought me out and offered me the role. I was thrilled.
But Alzheimer’s soon came to play a different role in my life.
For little did I know at the time that my half-sister, Doreen, who died last year, was on the verge of developing dementia. Her diagnosis hammered home the debilitating impact that this disease can have on an individual with it, as well as their family.
Just imagine being told you have dementia, realising why boiling a kettle, or using a cash machine, has been posing a challenge it never did before; why the words that once sprung to mind so easily now suddenly elude you.
THEN comes the second, equally frustrating blow: you are told that despite having a life-changing condition — despite the fact that you have paid taxes all your life — the NHS won’t cover your social care.
And so for many families, a diagnosis of dementia is often accompanied by financial punishment.
this is what most terrified Doreen and her husband, Jack, who was physically ill before her condition deteriorated.
Rather than go into residential care, and risk having to spend all their savings and sell their house to pay for it, they coped with care at home for as long as possible.
Eventually, Jack’s deteriorating health meant they could no longer manage, and in 2015 they moved into residential care.
Jack died shortly after, but Doreen spent almost four years in care, which forced the sale of their modest home — an asset which for so many like her is their whole life savings. Dementia is, and has long been, a most discriminated-against condition, which is why the Mail’s campaign is so important.
While the NHS provides free treatment for those diagnosed with heart disease or cancer — and rightly so — people with dementia are left at the mercy of a broken social care system. the absence of financial support for every person with dementia should embarrass us all.
As the countless tragic cases highlighted by this paper have revealed, people are having to sell their family homes and use life savings just to pay for their basic care. And it’s not just people with dementia paying the price — the NHS is, too.
ACCORDING to Alzheimer’s society research, in just one year more than 70,000 people with dementia were forced to go to A&E because inadequate or scarce social care left them unprotected from avoidable emergencies such as falls, infections and dehydration — at an estimated cost to the NHS of £400 million.
If we want to remedy the betrayal of dementia patients, we must act now. For although the past 20 years has been filled with political promises, successive governments have failed to take much-needed action.
As soon as he was elected in 1997, tony Blair claimed that he did not want ‘children to be brought up in a country where the only way pensioners can get long-term care is by selling their home’.
A Royal Commission was convened, but its recommendation for free long-term personal care was rejected a year later.
And when Alan Johnson — whose support for a ‘national Care service’ was also taken up by his immediate successor Andy Burnham — tried to revolutionise social care, Labour’s defeat in the election a year later meant their proposals were also shelved.
In the years since, from the Dilnot
review’s proposals in 2011 for a cap on care payments to Theresa May’s call in the last election for the current asset level of £23,250 — above which patients must fund themselves — to be raised, every attempt to improve our care system has fallen on deaf ears.
The 850,000 people in the UK living with dementia deserve better. Rather than delay the current Green Paper on social care for a seventh time in two years, our Government must finally commit to long-term social care reform and find a way to sustainably fund dementia care for the future. There is no other choice. By 2021, one million people in the UK will have dementia, and they will all need good- quality social care. Yet as it stands, the number of care homes is actually in decline — from 18,000 to 16,600 in the past nine years.
It’s already taking its toll on our finances: people with dementia have spent one million days in hospital beds when they should have been in care or nursing homes — costing the NHS more than £340 million.
This is the stark reality our new Prime Minister will face.
To end the dementia care crisis, he — whoever he is — must act. We have no time to lose.