To worry about where the money for dementia care will come from

[Potatoduster]

If the NHS is already stretched how on earth will it cope with a huge surge of the baby boomers needing dementia care and wanting the NHS to fully fund it?

I think that if care home owners were making the massive profits that some posters assume then they wouldn’t be going bust as often as they do. Margins are really really thin. Admittedly self-funded people are paying over the odds because councils strike such a hard bargain for their service users.
www.theguardian.com/society/2019/mar/11/over-400-care-home-operators-collapse-in-five-years-as-cuts-take-toll

To my mind the best solution is the “death tax” which the bloody Tories sabotaged a couple of elections ago rather than pursuing a cross-party solution. Instead of rolling the dice so people whose parents die of cancer get a full inheritance and people whose parents die of dementia get nothing, levy a large flat rate on all estates over a certain amount and use it to fund elder social care. Basically a dementia insurance scheme paid from inheritances.

@Troels - do you think care homes are maybe complicit in keeping people alive much longer than their natural life, for profit?

I do wonder, as my mum has recently died in hospital, of pneumonia with dementia, plus other medical ailments. If the pneumonia hadn't taken her, she could have ended up in a care home for years on end, unable to walk, non-verbal, deaf, not eating, doubly incontinent, scared and paranoid, and the rest. A non-life of suffering really. For £££ per month. I'm sad she has died, but I'd have been devastated if she had lived.

I think care homes go bust as they are asset stripped and then run into the ground.

My mum died in April at 90. She spent the last 6 years in a rest home specialising in dementia care. She’d had to sell the family house (dad died in 2012) and self fund the care. £35,000 a year by the end so in total something like £250,000 in total. Mind boggling ! Regular increases every year and then at the start of this year we warned there may be twice yearly rises apparently because of the living wage and inflation.

Living wage and workplace pensions reforms are having a huge effect on the budgets of care homes, hospitals and nurseries. I don’t think anyone here would argue that those changes are bad things in principle, but any business which trades on bulk volumes of low wage woman-hours is having its business model hammered and needs to either hike its rates or get more government subsidy.

One solution would be to cap care home fees at say £150,000 -£200,000 per person. This would allow insurance companies to offer a product which most people with assets would probably buy.

t can be funded by the NHS if the dementia causes the person to have a 'health need' and they qualify for CHC. That is for people with nursing needs such as physical aggression, frequent falls etc

CHC funding is a joke for families trying to do the right thing by loved ones with dementia. My mum got it for the last 36 hours of her life only. And that was because, cynically, the hospital didn’t want her death on their statistics. Her health needs were many and complex.

@Charley50 we certainly didn’t think my grandmother would see Christmas 5 years ago (we thought this in the August). She moved in to her care home in the September and here we are now, with her general health seemingly much improved but her dementia 100 times worse. (She eats and drinks much better now, which has improved her health). There seems to be nothing wrong with any of her major organs, except her brain. Her breathing, heart, digestion etc, all reasonably fine for a near 90 year old. She (like many other of her fellow residents) is in and out of hospital from falls, but touch wood hasn’t broken anything, just lots of bad bumps and bruises.

If she had stayed living alone, I’m in no doubt she would have met a miserable end a few years ago (would that have been kinder than the long drawn out suffering we have now- how can I answer that?)

@Charley50 Not sure about others, but we don't. If they are in decline they seem to be determined to go and they do. Yet others are srtong souls and live with us many years and are healthy other than the dementia like Maryann 1975's grandmother.
We try hard not to send them off to hospital it's too distressing for them and makes things so much worse. The family get to decide when they are admitted when possible, unless it's something like a broken hip.

SouthChinaSea234 the Care Act did try to cap care costs (£70k, for care only so not including food, accomodation etc) but this was stopped.

CHC is very, very hard to get.

@Maryann1975 - "I’m in no doubt she would have met a miserable end a few years ago (would that have been kinder than the long drawn out suffering we have now- how can I answer that?)"

That is the question really isn't it? That's why I've filled in an advanced directive, as I don't want to suffer like that, and tbh don't want to put my one DC through that either. Maybe I'll change my mind when I get older and tear it up. I doubt it though.

Apart from the experienced qualified carers, many care homes employ young inexperienced teenagers, often not even checking their credentials

I don't know how you can be so certain that is the norm cool. My dm's care home didn't employ any teenagers - which may not be the norm either.

But I assume that my dm's care home was not unusual in assigning an experienced key worker to each resident, who would then be responsible for ensuring that the less experienced staff did what they needed to.

£1400 per week sound like a lot of money but it works out at £8.33p per hour - so, not much over the minimum wage.

@Hmmmbop SouthChinaSea234 the Care Act did try to cap care costs (£70k, for care only so not including food, accomodation etc) but this was stopped

I think that was a real pity. There was a lot of party political game playing over what should be a cross party proposal and a cross party solution. May brought it up again in the 2017 election campaign and it was ridiculed as a tax on dementia. But without a cap the insurance industry will not be able to come up with a product that addresses the risk.