Tag Archives: carers

Poor care at homes leads to thousand of elderly being admitted to hospital

August 9, 2012   Carers, Older care

Hundreds of thousands of elderly people are admitted to hospital as emergencies because of poor care in the community, a study has found.

Rural primary care trusts and those with large elderly populations had low emergency bed use

By , Medical Editor

7:00AM BST 09 Aug 2012

The failure of GPs, community health services and social care services to work together means large numbers of over 65s are admitted to hospitals, the King’s Fund think tank has found.

Researchers found that 2.3m overnight stays in hospital could be prevented if all areas of the country performed as well as the top 25 per cent.

This is the equivalent of 7,000 hospital beds, or several medium sized hospitals full of elderly emergency cases every night of the year.

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Review of national arrangements for providing information and advice to carers

August 8, 2012   Carers

Review of national arrangements for providing information and advice to carers

8 August, 2012

The department has today published a review of the service arrangements for providing information and advice to carers.

Access to good information and advice is important in supporting carers to get the best from their own lives and assist them in getting the right help to maintain them in their caring role.

Carers Direct provides an on line information point for carers, as part of NHS Choices, and a telephone advice line through which they can gain access to individual advice.

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Mental health spending falls for first time in 10 years

August 7, 2012   Carers, Depression, mental health, ukcuts

Total government expenditure on services down by £150m, the first reduction since 2001, says Department of Health report

 

 

More than 6 million Britons are estimated to sufer from depression each year.

Spending in real terms on mental health has declined for the first time in a decade, a report for the Department of Health has found.

Although one of the coalition’s first big policy announcements was to declare that mental health ought to have “parity with physical health in the NHS”, investment in mental health for working-age adults dropped by 1%, once inflation is taken into account, to £6.63bn. For the elderly the recorded fall in real terms spending was 3.1% to £2.83bn.

In total, spending on mental health services in England dropped by £150m, the first fall since 2001. However this drop comes after a decade of rising investment: in 2001 just £4.1bn was spent on working-age adults mental health.

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