Category Archives: Social care

Now is the time to create a combined health and social care system

September 4, 2014   Carers, health, Social care, welfare

4th September 2014

Merging two leaky buckets does not provide a watertight solution.

NHS England’s chief executive, Simon Stevens, recently told the Health Select Committee that merging two leaky buckets does not provide a watertight solution. It is for this reason that the growing problems in the NHS and social care cannot be solved by the Better Care Fund or any of the other short-term solutions on offer. Nothing less than a fundamental reform of the funding of health and social care services and citizens’ entitlements to publicly funded support is required to address these problems.

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Service users and carers help draw up homecare blueprint

September 2, 2014   Carers, Featured Article, Social care

Practitioners, carers and service users are helping the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence write guidance for improving homecare

 

  • Bridget Warr, chief executive, UK Homecare Association
  • Guardian Professional,
The members of the guideline development group are examining the issues and defining good practice, ‘with a reality check at every step’. 

Sandra is passionate about good homecare. Her mother had Alzheimer’s and Sandra watched carers come into the home for five years. Sandra knows, as an “expert by experience”, about the big homecare issues: reliability and flexibility of staff, continuity of care and the difficulty of having strangers in the house.

Sandra is a member of a group of people who are helping the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (Nice) to produce its first social care guidance, on providing care and support in people’s homes. By highlighting the issues they know about, she and the other carers and service users are keeping them at the forefront of care providers’ minds. It’s a complex thing to get right, but carers and users must be at the heart of improving service provision “inch by inch,” Sandra says.

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Care choice plan ‘could fail’ as councils stick to EU rules

August 18, 2014   Carers, Featured Article, Scotland, Social care

CHARITIES have warned policies designed to let older people choose their own care will fail if councils insist on following European rules on tendering

FORECAST: Annie Gunner Logan says she saw the problem coming.

Personalisation policies, which have near-universal support from the Government, councils and care providers, are meant to give elderly and disabled people and their carers a choice of the services they receive, and help keep them in their own homes.

But care providers have long warned there is a basic incompatibility between this choice and procurement rules councils follow when commissioning services.

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