It’s good to see some steps in the right direction when it comes to the adult social care crisis.
A new whitepaper entitled Ready to Care: The First Steps to Fixing Social Care has been released, providing a plan for the new government to address the social care challenges across the UK.
Seven key recommendations have been shared that could be implemented in the Autumn budget, with the aim of taking effect by the end of the year:
- New legislation to amend the 2022 Health and Care Act, removing silos, improving coordination, reducing hospital admissions, and streamlining discharges.
- NHS England to delegate healthcare tasks to trained care workers for specific acute and chronic conditions, keeping thousands of patients out of hospital.
- Establish a national online support service for the 5 million unpaid carers, whose care is valued at £162 billion—nearly the NHS budget.
- Reduce the hidden burden of travel time for homecare workers. They’re currently sent to scattered areas, spending nearly 20% of their time travelling and 75% aren’t receiving proper compensation.
- The CQC to undergo a rapid overhaul using digital tools, reforming care assessments, streamlining inspections, allowing for mock evaluations, and shortening lengthy inspection times.
- Mandate real-time data sharing between hospitals and care providers, improving patient discharge processes, resource planning, and collaboration between the NHS and social care sectors.
- Seed a Teach First style programme for Social Care Leaders.
The recommendations have been published by home technology company Birdie, in collaboration with 20 leading UK social care experts across various sectors, including providers, local authorities, NHS trusts, and policy organisation.
It’s a step in the right direction that’s much needed, given the concerning gaps in the health and social care workforce.
The over-reliance on international recruitment is unsustainable, with health and care worker visas more than doubling in a year. 143,990 health and care worker visas were granted in the year ending September 2023, compared to 61,274 in the previous year, and this doesn’t include their dependants.
Such high levels of care worker migration can’t be sustained, and the solution lies in proper funding for the care sector so that people in the UK are willing to do the jobs. With more than 125,000 vacancies across the NHS in England and around 150,000 in social care, we can’t keep relying on international recruitment to plug these huge gaps.
Social care staff must be better paid, better valued and better trained if we want to create a sustainable, diverse, and skilled workforce for the future. And it looks like there may be light at the end of the tunnel.
Care workers could see their first ever Fair Pay Agreement next year, under plans unveiled by care minister Stephen Kinnock.
Priorities for improving service resilience include:
- A ‘home first’ approach that supports people to live independently for as long as possible
- A relentless focus on ensuring high-quality care
- Close involvement of people receiving care and their families and carers
Plans are to engage with the sector including workers and trade unions to establish the first ever fair pay agreement for care professionals, with the long-term plan of creating a National Care Service.
This can’t come soon enough in light of research showing how ill-prepared the Baby Boomer generation are for care costs in later life.
A poll of more than a thousand HNWs revealed 28 per cent of this generation has not ring-fenced money to fund any care they may need and still leave their family some inheritance.
There’s a marked difference in attitude between generations when it comes to funding care. Gen Z (43 per cent) were much more likely than Baby Boomers (12 per cent) to acknowledge they would need financial support from their children in later life. While 43 per cent of Millennials surveyed agreed that any care they would need would be funded by their spouse, compared to 26 per cent of Baby Boomers.
The research raises alarm bells for the ageing population and a soaring demand for later-life care, where families risk having to make serious compromise to pay for unexpected long-term care costs.
Although we all hope for long-term independence in retirement, it’s vital to have the right plans in place to account for unforeseen circumstances, and discussion with a qualified professional can make an enormous difference in finding the right advice.