Tag Archives: social care

Thousands more people will have to pay Inheritance tax

Social care: Inheritance tax freeze expected

An elderly woman's hand on  a stick Under the proposals, the state would cover the cost of care above £75,000

Thousands more people will have to pay inheritance tax to help fund long-awaited social care reforms in England, ministers will announce on Monday.

The inheritance tax threshold is to be frozen at £325,000 for individuals and £650,000 for couples for three years from 2015.

That will help to fund plans including an expected cap of £75,000 on the costs people in England have to pay for care.

Campaigners say higher taxes have been introduced “by the back door”.

More compassion and help is needed for the people who do the caring!

Cameron wants care and compassion? He’d do well to show some himself

It’s the norm now for the people who clean up after others to be unimportant, poorly paid and denied rights. That’s got to change

Gloria Foster death

Gloria Foster, pictured here on her wedding day, who died earlier this month after lying alone for nine days due to care agency failure. It’s about cultural values versus economic ones, writes Deborah Orr

It may have been the “apparently high mortality rates in patients admitted as emergencies” that prompted the first of many investigations into Stafford Hospital. But it’s the reports of bedridden patients lying in their own urine and excrement that illustrate the depth of the “systemic failure” at the hospital. Because everybody knows that isn’t right. You need no training – medical or otherwise – no management expertise or experience, no special “vocation” or long-honed skill, to understand that you don’t do that to animals, let alone humans.

And that, in a nutshell, is the problem. Our intensely hierarchical economic system runs on specialisation – the attainment of qualifications, the accumulation of experience, the possession of skill, talent, instinct, flair, ruthlessness, the ability to manage or make money, all wrapped up in a bundle that makes an individual special and unique. So the things that all humans are expected to comprehend, and be able to turn their hand to, have no value.

I’m not just talking about the NHS. Of course, hospitals contain concentrated numbers of people who can’t get to the loo by themselves, and a lack of cleanliness can and does have sometimes fatal consequences. So the general failure to reward “menial” tasks is particularly egregious in hospitals.

Department of Health needs your views to improve social care

Department seeks views on NICE standards to improve quality of social care

1 February, 2013

Care and Support Minister Norman Lamb, today launched a 12 week consultation to establish a full set of NICE quality standards and guidance for social care.

The Department is seeking ideas from care users, their families and carers, service commissioners, care providers and front line staff to help decide on future topics for NICE guidance and standards.

The aim is to establish a full set of NICE quality standards and guidance in order to improve the quality of social care.