Monthly Archives: September 2014

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

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.

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.

The torment of trying to be a good granny AND a dutiful daughter

Top author Rosie Staal says women like her are in despair

  • 92-year-old mother Jean is beset by Alzheimer’s, breast cancer, hearing loss and poor sight 
  • Rosie longs to spend more time with grandsons Joe, 5 and Zach, 3, and her two-year-old granddaughter Poppy
  • Women over 60 make up nearly a third of all hospital admissions for anxiety – juggling caring for elderly parents, grandchildren and ageing or ill partners
  • Rosie worries she is also neglecting her husband David 

By Rosie Staal

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On the train heading home to Dorset from London last week, I leaned my head against the cold window, closed my eyes and savoured a rare moment to draw breath.

After spending three days with my grandsons Joe, five, and Zach, three, I could still hear their joyful voices in my ears and feel their trusting little hands in mine.

Turning my back as they wave goodbye haunts me after every visit, causing a physical jolt to my heart.