Virus a day of reckoning for social care

THE COVID-19 death toll is still increasing and our social care settings are now the front line in the fight against the virus.

Hugely increasing costs and reducing admissions are placing enormous financial pressures on care providers and some are in a battle for survival – and a battle to cope with coronavirus.

Our pleas, thus far, for some financial support from the Government are mainly falling on deaf ears, save for the minor concession of lifting VAT off personal protective equipment (PPE). Just for the record the price of PPE has gone up enormously since demand grew.

Many critics are saying care providers should have been better prepared and that they have enough money to be able to absorb the increasing costs, but many run on very tight margins and any rise in costs – and fall in income – has a huge impact.

More importantly, to see this as merely a problem that has surfaced now is to miss the point. It gives nobody any satisfaction to know that we have long feared that this might happen.

Years of neglect of social care ensured that the sector was on its knees when this most lethal of viruses hit us.

Yet our voices have never been listened to when we warned that the £8bn cut from social care budgets since 2010 was leaving social care in crisis and vulnerable to something like coronavirus.

I have written to prime ministers, to secretaries of state and to ministers, warning that the Government needed to act to protect and reform social care as it was at risk of collapse. But I never received any reply.

I even wrote to all 650 MPs urging each and every one of them to stand up for social care. I received just a handful of sympathetic but in the end meaningless replies.

Government after government has promised reform, but still we wait. In 17 years we’ve had 13 documents – including reports, commissions and white papers, all setting out to resolve the crisis and all coming to nothing.

Respected body after respected body has warned of social care in crisis and at tipping point – from Age UK to ADASS to the King’s Fund, the Care Quality Commission and many more.

Thirteen Government ministers with social care in their remit have come and gone without making any impact. When he took office, Boris Johnson promised to end the crisis with a Green Paper setting out future reform.

We are yet to see it, and once this is over, there must be a day of reckoning for social care and some bold, radical steps to put on the sector on a par with NHS care.

Even when it became painfully clear that care and nursing homes, and the care of people in their own homes, would be critical in the fight against coronavirus, the Government was slow to support social care.

All the attention was placed on NHS care whilst social care providers struggled to get proper personal protective equipment (PPE), proper testing regimes and financial support.

Only when the death toll started to mount did the Government wake up to the fact that the second front (now the front line) in the fight against Covid-19 was in social care.

And even now that it has, we are still struggling to access reliable sources of PPE, testing is still sporadic with many residents and staff still not tested and the extra money the Government has given to local authorities (£3.2m) slow to get to the front line or not getting there at all.

At the same time, care staff who are off sick, or self-isolating with symptoms, are only able to get Statutory Sick Pay and are struggling – some may be working on, despite being ill.

Hard-pressed care providers cannot afford to make up their wages and the Government won’t furlough care staff, even though it pays NHS staff their full pay if they are off sick.

With death rates falling in hospitals while rising in care and nursing homes, there is now huge pressure on social care to overcome coronavirus within its walls.

But, as we have been all along, we are fighting this battle with one arm tied behind our backs as we are, once more, the poor relation in care.

If one good thing can come out of all, this it must be that social care gets the long-overdue attention it needs. The Government must be bold, must recall the day in July 1948 when the NHS was first set up and then create something similarly amazing for the care of our oldest and most vulnerable.