WHAT THE EXPERTS THINK
MIKE PADGHAM Care home owners’ spokesman
THE true issue with adult social care is the neglect and underfunding it has suffered from government after government for the past 30 years or more.
Some £8billion has been cut from social care budgets in the past decade alone with the result that 1.5 million people can’t get the care they need and the sector has 100,000 staff vacancies at any one time.
Coronavirus has laid bare a sector that was ill-prepared for a severe, lethal virus outbreak. We are seeing death rates continue to rise in care and nursing homes, while hospital rates fall. It seemed to be forgotten that social care looks after some 400,000 vulnerable people in residential care, almost three times the number of people in hospital beds, and 640,000 people in their own homes too. Social care employs 1.6 million people, compared with the 1.3 million in the NHS.
We have argued for a long time that social care and the NHS should be merged so we offer a true cradle-to-grave service under either local or national control, not the splintered system we now have.
For that to work, the Government has to recognise the true worth of social care and fund it properly so providers are paid a fair price for delivering care and their staff get a fair rate of pay to make the job attractive to people, so that we can end the staffing crisis.
Whatever the solution is, we have to be bold and we have to act fast.
ROS ALTMANN Older people’s champion
THE coronavirus death toll is starkly exposing failings in our social care system.
Our precious National Health Service has been at the forefront of policy decisions, but laudable efforts to “protect the NHS” have placed people relying on social rather than health care at hugely increased risk.
But with so much upheaval resulting from this crisis, let this be a time for positive change. I will require tough fiscal choices, including increasing tax and national insurance to cover care. Everyone should contribute to the system, rather than pushing costs on to those with certain illnesses.
Free basic provision can be topped up to provide earlier or higher quality care. Integrating social care into the NHS and integrating care funding into pensions or ISA savings are sensible options.
Social care needs parity of esteem with the NHS. The older generations deserve nothing less.
KATE LEE Chief executive Alzheimer’s Society
IT’S great to see Baroness Altmann’s plea joining our calls to provide free care at the point of need, and this must include the cost of complex dementia care.
People with dementia are among the most vulnerable. The funding of their care should be spread between us. We couldn’t agree more that social care must work closely with the NHS for a fairer, more sustainable overhaul of the sector.
Our Fix Dementia Care campaign has shown that people with dementia typically spend their life savings of more than £100,000 on their own care, only getting support based on what they can afford and not what they clinically need.
The social care crisis is a dementia crisis – most people using social care have dementia, and the impact on the NHS is huge.
As the NHS continually states, its future depends on a social care solution being found.