Tag Archives: social care

Service users and carers help draw up homecare blueprint

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

 

  • 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.

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

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.

Will the Care Act blur the distinction between health and social care?

Call for greater clarity ahead of new legislation

Thursday 14 August 2014 08.30 BST
David Brindle, guardian Professional
Chief executive of the NHS, Simon Stevens, who has suggested he would like to see care homes close. Photograph: Owen Humphreys/PA

There’s still a good deal of muttering about a comment a few weeks ago by new NHS chief executive Simon Stevens that he was looking forward to the demise of care homes. “It would be a disappointment,” he told charity Age UK’s annual Later Life conference, “if in 30, 40, 50 years’ time, nursing homes still existed.”