There’s an overwhelming feeling of concern about the care systems across the UK and how they’re serving us as we get older.
Current conversation has focussed on the speed to discharge from hospitals and how it’s overwhelming a shrinking base of care homes.
Faster hospital discharges are leading to an increase in the average size of care packages for people being discharged from hospital. The size of these care packages has increased in 76% of council areas over the past 12 months, meaning that many older people with a disability are needing more support from social care as they are more unwell following their hospital stay.
Research from the ADASS annual survey shows that people are requiring more complex care and support due to illness and disability, but that local councils are struggling financially to meet people’s needs. The average number of home care hours which councils are providing per person, has risen from 697 hours in 2022 to 750 hours in 2024.
And as councils provide more hours of complex care and support, it’s the people needing low-level, early support at home who are at risk of missing out or an escalation of their needs. As a result, people are more likely to need to access emergency care and hospital treatment, piling yet more pressure on the NHS.
Releasing vulnerable patients from hospital is creating a huge crisis in social care. and investment must shift from a focus on freeing up hospital beds to better funding for social care. ADASS have described the situation to be “as bad as it has been in recent history” when it comes to adult social care budgets, with a £586 million overspend in 2023/24 and “an increasing reliance on one-off reserves to prop up budgets.”
Healthwatch have also commented that based on there being approximately 5.4 million working-age adults with a disability in England, survey results suggest there could be around 1.5 million people across the country eligible for support who haven’t yet been assessed. Not all of them will be eligible for publicly funded care, but far too many clearly live with some form of unmet need and don’t know where to turn for support.
The new government must shift to investing in more social care, supporting unpaid carers, and providing healthcare in the local community to prevent people reaching crisis point and ending up in hospital in the first place. And without investment in early care and support at home, spending more on the NHS has been compared to pouring water down a sink with no plug.
Skills for Care, the strategic workforce development and planning body for adult social care in England, has this month launched its new workforce strategy for adult social care. It aims to identify the workforce needs over the next 15 years and produce a plan for ensuring the sector has enough of the right people with the right skills, tackling head-on the significant challenges which social care is facing. And there’s never been a greater need for it.
The president of ADASS, Melanie Williams, quite rightly comments that their latest report shows “an unsustainable and worrying picture for the 4 out of 5 of us needing adult social care in the future and sends a clear message that we can’t keep doing more of the same.”