How do we solve the social care crisis ?

[Worriedddd]

We have complex needs patients being stuck in hospital for up to 2 years. Some even more they are ready to leave just there's no social care placements and they can't get the right staff anyway. For minimum wage carers will have support people with very challenging needs. There is high risk of assault in many care settings employers don't offer the right training like de-escalation and breakway. . You could get more money working for Lidl and aldi. Even with immigration people leave and find another job. What's the solution to this ?

Everyone with more than £23.5 in assets, apart from their home, has to pay for their care at home now.

Is there not a cap though?

Or has that not come in yet?

Besides my original point was that older people will need to pay more for care That's regardless if it's for them or not. We need a wealth tax as well as other tax reforms. Too much burden on current income tax payers & they are shrinking.

No cap. Some people spend their entire house value on care. It’s a lottery.

Better pay and status for carers - and not just in terms of making it a career choice where you're needed to bang out a few good essays to be classed as a "good" one because I've met some incredible ones who may not be incredibly educated or literate but have emotional intelligence and an ability to relate to their residents that is off the scale awesome.

Regulation of some of the shitty big business money-grabbing operations who treat staff like shit and have staff turnover out of the wazoo meaning that then any support plans that are in place for residents don't get followed and end up in a dusty folder never looked at on a shelf somewhere - then the resident's behaviour begins to challenge again as their needs aren't being met - and placements break down and it all goes to absolute shit.

Support and funding for community NHS teams to support both care homes and families caring for relatives at home - if there's not the physio/OT/SALT/nursing back up - people end up back in hospital or placements break down. Likewise more support for the intervention teams that try to prevent placement breakdowns and hospital admissions.

I spend a fair amount of my working life in care settings for individuals with LD - there are some absolutely fucking amazing ones where if they call in my team for guidance you KNOW they'll put in as much of it as they can, and the residents have a better blooming social life than I do - and then there are some where the staff just are in the mentality of getting the residents to sit and watch TV and be "contained" and it's agency staff or new manager after new manager.

Until ‘working in care’ is considered as ‘worthy’ as teaching or nursing (for example) and is still so poorly paid, nothing will change. You only have to look at the job adverts - ‘no experience/qualifications needed’, that screams poorly/unskilled people who often resort to care work as a last resort too.

@Blossomtoes so someone who isn't moving into a care home but has care in the home needs to sell their home to pay for that care now?

Absolutely agree with you. I have this conversation regularly with my customers who are a wide demographic, and have yet to meet one who doesn't want to be in control of their own death. It is simply more humane, and would solve the problem of so many old people with no quality of life suffering and costing the state a fortune.

Care Assistant here.

We need care to be seen as an actual profession. With progression, training, with a proper salary and sick pay scale. It is far too easy for (forgive me) absolute idiots to get into the care sector and fly under the radar whilst hard working, skilled and compassionate colleagues pick up the slack.

We as people, and our families need to start thinking long and hard about our future and how much treatment we realistically want. Modern medicine keeps many people alive but often with no quality of life, and for emotional and sometimes selfish reasons families insist on pushing with treatment rather than allowing a comfortable passing. Visitors to care homes only often see snippets of a person's day, and not the harrowing, undignified and sad side of their life. No matter how much we promote excellent care standards, there is nothing dignified about aome of the lives people are left to live because of medical intervention.

Younger people with care needs also need to be seriously considered, care isn't always for old, sick people. We have many clients who could safely live at home, if a home was safe for them but there is a huge lack of supported or assisted living housing.

I also believe people who can pay for care, should do so.

The whole system needs to be picked apart and started again, with money spent in the right place. A National Care Service.

We need care to be seen as an actual profession. With progression, training, with a proper salary and sick pay scale. It is far too easy for (forgive me) absolute idiots to get into the care sector and fly under the radar whilst hard working, skilled and compassionate colleagues pick up the slack.

agree

Not yet. That was what May’s “dementia tax” wanted to achieve. Thing is, if you’re living in your home, you can’t really sell it because where would you live?

We are getting a national care service in Scotland. It'll be interesting to see how it works out.

@Blossomtoes but does a charge get put on it then?

More pay
Sick pay covered with normal pay
Better training in terms of actually providing client-led holistic care

Don't forget the state pension age has been increased to 66 and will be going higher very soon. People can't live on the paltry Carer's Allowance. Most people only go into care when it is no longer possible for them to be cared for at home or for them to be kept safe. Carers get burnout and often end up dying before their time due to the stress and lack of sleep over a period of months and years. We need to consider quality of life not quantity.

I've been caring for DParent for almost 3 years, having given up a good job to do so. I claim £67 per week carer's allowance. DH and I have just had a difficult conversation because we thought we'd be able to manage financially on his salary. Due to cost of living increases and the sight of our pensions disappearing into the sunset I'm now going to have to try and find a job.

DParent will probably end up in a care home, funded by the local authority costing far more than the £67 I'm currently receiving. I'm devastated by this - I've seen what happens to people in care homes, even with amazing staff.

Perhaps if family carers were paid £300 per week it would help, keeping people out of care homes, not putting families in the position of not being able to keep their family members at home for financial reasons.

Hyper local teams of community doctors, nurses, OTs and carers who are responsible for managing the care needs of their locality and receiving patients home from hospital. With community group involvement and volunteer community resilience teams to back them up at surge times.

No.

Open new care homes be run as not for profit.
Some big care groups pay directors nearly a £1m a year. Also some take out loans in tax havens in order to reduce their UK tax liability. The govt should crack down on those practices but we know the current incumbents won't do that. Maybe they are party donors? Who knows?

which is why I said equity is going to need to be tapped into, not just for those who going into a care home.

Have you done care rotas? The only reason I could get enough people to do nights and weekends was because they also got more sociable shifts. If there were enough candidates looking for care jobs and enough of them wanted nights/weekends it would be great but years of doing care rotas tell me it isn't going to work now. Well it wouldn't work where I am, maybe you have more candidates for jobs where you are. I was able to offer regular hours to a limited number of people e.g. students wanting to work weekends, experienced staff who wanted to reduce hours but funnily enough I never had anyone who permanently wanted to do nights, late shifts or 6 am starts. I'd have had a stampede if I'd been offering everyone permanent days Monday to Friday but wouldn't have actually provided round the clock care for our residents.

Better money for unsocial hours would be great, shame the LAs or NHS won't actually pay enough for that.

That’s not going to be of any use to the thousands of people who don’t own their house. The state will have to continue to fund their care.

You may remember the response when May proposed that in 2017.

I agree that people should take responsibility for caring for their family, but only if they want to. My father (thankfully now dead) was a horrible, horrible man and I would not have provided care for him. I didn't even go to his funeral (in fact, I'm not even sure whether he was buried or cremated). Being forced to provide care for him would have been in neither his nor my best interests. Conversely, I have taken annual leave to tie in with family members needing care (eg post-op or during chemo). I appreciate not everyone can do that.

I disagree with the poster who said carers should be seen as equal to nurses but I do think they need to be better-trained and they should be regulated by some professional body. I think it's currently too easy for a bad carer to leave one job and walk into another within the care industry.

I do agree that social care should be state run and that homes should be purpose-built buildings. Too many homes are in lovely old houses with narrow corridors and sharps corners. Carers are often trained in-house meaning that bad habits just get passed down. It's not the fault of the carers who are trained in poor manual handling techniques for instance. For someone who said that the old system of SEN and SRN should be brought back, it sort of has, to an extent. Nursing associates have been employed on England for the last few years (I'm not sure about Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland).

I think if we did have a state run social care service, care homes should not have the ability to firstly have direct referrals from patients likely to be admitted there (eg elderly people choosing to move in to a care home self-funded because they are lonely at home but have no actual care needs) or have the ability to decline referrals from hospitals or social workers who have deemed the home a match for a person's needs. I have seen this at work (admittedly a few years ago when I was a ward nurse), we would have 'difficult patients' who would be reviewed by several care home managers who would deem them unsuitable. These patients would get difficult to place and would be in a hospital bed unnecessarily.

Social care needs better funding. Of course the NHS is underfunded but diverting money to social care would help the NHS, patients could be discharged to an appropriate placement if needed or have carers in place freeing up NHS beds, hopefully getting patients out of A&E and out of the back of ambulances quicker.

Building retirement complexes would help with home carers. People could have their own place but have support nearby (wardens) and companionship in shared spaces, but community services such as carers or visiting healthcare professionals (district nurses, podiatry etc) would be able to do several calls at one visit.

Finally, I think that all care homes should employ nurses. My sister currently works in a care home. She seems dedicated (she goes in fairly often on her days off to take her dogs to visit and has gone in again on her days off to take residents to weddings or hospital appointments) but some of what she tells me about isn't right. People also aren't moved on appropriately to nursing homes. If there were nurses employed, residents could be appropriately assessed for whether the home can meet their needs, and people with more complex needs could stay in the place they have hopefully come to view as their home.

That’s not going to be of any use to the thousands of people who don’t own their house. The state will have to continue to fund their care.

who claimed otherwise? still plenty of people do own their own homes.

You may remember the response when May proposed that in 2017

A negative one I'm sure because everyone wants someone else to pay...