Social care for older people: Home truths

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Part of The sustainability of social care services

This report, published jointly with the Nuffield Trust, looks at the current state of social care services for older people in England, through a combination of national data and interviews with local authorities, NHS and private providers, Healthwatch and other groups. It considers the impact of cuts in local authority spending on social care providers and on older people, their families and carers. Alongside this work, we were commissioned by the Richmond Group of Charities to interview older people about their experiences of social care.

The picture that emerges is of social care providers under pressure, struggling to retain staff, maintain quality and stay in business; local authorities making unenviable choices about where to make reductions; a complex set of causes of delays in discharging older people from hospital; and the voluntary sector keeping services going even when funding was curtailed.

Key findings

  • Social care for older people is under massive pressure; increasing numbers of people are not receiving the help they need, which in turn puts a strain on carers.
  • Access to care depends increasingly on what people can afford – and where they live – rather than on what they need.
  • Under-investment in primary and community NHS services is undermining the policy objective of keeping people independent and out of residential care The Care Act 2014 has created new demands and expectations but funding has not kept pace. Local authorities have little room to make further savings, and most will soon be unable to meet basic statutory duties.

Policy implications

Based on the evidence in the report, the authors recommend that policy-makers need to address three major challenges in shaping the development of social care over the next five years, focusing on how to:

  • achieve more with fewer resources – for example, through better commissioning and integrated care – recognising that these initiatives will not be enough to close the funding gap
  • establish a more explicit policy framework, which makes it clear that primary responsibility for funding care sits with individuals and families
  • reform the long-term funding of social care because reliance on additional private funding is unlikely to be sufficient or equitable.

Summary presentation

Speaking at our breakfast event on 15 September 2016, Richard Humphries, Assistant Director of Policy, introduces and shares findings from our report, Social care for older people: home truths.

Good morning everyone. I am very pleased to present the findings of the report on behalf of the project team. That is Ruth Thorlby and Holly Holder from the Nuffield Trust, and Patrick Hall and Anna Charles from The King’s Fund.  And if you have got any really difficult questions, I am sure they would be delighted to answer them.  Thank you.  So this is what we are going to cover very quickly.  The project was really about looking at what has happened to social care for older people over the last five years.  And although some of the messages will not be that unfamiliar, I think what is different, and what is distinctive about the report that we are publishing today, is that we are looking at it from the perspectives of the local authorities, of care providers, and the NHS, and most importantly of all what this means for older people and their families and carers.  So we are taking a 360 degree view.  We have no particular axe to grind about any of those perspectives as two independent think tanks.

And what we did essentially, we looked at a load of data and numbers, and evidence. We talked to a lot of people in four very different parts of the country, from a range of services and backgrounds, and last but not least we were delighted to be commissioned by the Richmond Group of Charities to talk to a small group of older people and their carers about their experience. And in some ways this is the most powerful testimony you might be hearing today.  Because behind all of the statistics in our report there are people’s lives and their stories, and they are brought out very powerfully I think in the report that Richmond Group are publishing today alongside our report, and you will be hearing more from Tom Wright shortly.

So what did we find? First of all big reductions in council spending, even if you adjust it for the aging population. 81% of councils have cut spending, gross spending, over the last five years, and most of them by at least 10%.  There are some exceptions.  18 councils have managed to maintain or even increase spending, but as you can see the overall picture is one of reductions in spend.  And bearing in mind, over this period, this five/six year period, the number of over 85s, these are the people that are going to make the biggest demands on health and social care, have increased by around 11%.  So try and keep that figure in your mind as we work through the findings.

And it is not just social care. And you will see, you can’t see this terribly well, but there are fewer GPs per head of the older population over the last few years, and district nurses. There are 14% fewer district nurses than there were two years ago, 28% since 2009.  So there is a pattern here of underinvestment across a range of services that keep people at home.  So despite all the rhetoric about care closer to home, keeping people out of hospital, the key metrics about money, and workforce are moving entirely in the wrong direction.  And a lot of these points about providers, people that provide social care services, will be familiar.  But what emerges from this is an increasing polarisation of the market, that if you live in an affluent area the care market is actually in many places very buoyant indeed, because there are a lot of people who are paying for their own care, self funders.  And we also see in many places, the market is being propped up by those self funders, who in some cases are paying up to 40% more than the local authority rate.  So there is a lot of cross subsidy going on.

And we worry most about providers in areas where they are very reliant on local authority contracts, they don’t have many self funders. And our prediction is that it is a matter of when but not if we see further provider failures. Our biggest concern is about the state of the home care provider market.  And let me just show you one graph that picks it up.  This is why people get stuck in hospital, going back to 2010.  And if you look at that thick orange line, that is the number of people stuck in hospital because they are waiting for packages of care at home, a 40% increase in the last year alone, 160% increase over the last five years.  So the writing is on the wall.  And this is an astronomical rise, nearly 36,000 delayed days.  This is now the biggest single cause of people getting stuck in hospital, so it really is very, very worrying.

Most importantly of all, what did we say about the impact of all of this on older people and their carers? We found that councils have worked very, very hard, to use austerity to focus on making better use of resources and services like reablement, in many cases have successfully reduced the need for long term care. And councils generally have sought to protect those with the highest needs.  But they are running out of road to make further savings.  And despite the aging population, that 11% increase, and not just the numbers, but the fact that older people now have more complex and more acute needs, it is really quite astonishing, and I use the word demography defined, that 26% fewer, at least 26% fewer old people, are getting publicly funded care.  And even more alarming is that nobody has a clear picture of what has happened to them, and the actual extent of unmet need.  It may be paradoxical then that satisfaction levels of people using social care has remained relatively buoyant, that underlines our concern about what is happening to people that fall outside of the system.

But it is also significant that satisfaction levels of carers are much lower, and they are falling. And there is evidence that actually carers are doing much more of the heavy lifting than they used to. We also see that complaints to the local government ombudsman are rising, and that is ominous, because more of them are being upheld.  And that suggests to us that councils are finding it very, very hard, much harder to meet their legal requirements.  And I suppose putting that together our headline conclusion is that access to care depends increasingly on what people can afford, and where they live.

So where does that leave us? The funding outlook is bleak, and we don’t want to get too absorbed in the detail of this change. But if we look at the right hand side of the graph, and if we look at those purple bars, those are based on the government’s own estimates of what is going to happen to social care spending.  And you can see even by their estimates it is going to continue to fall for the next year at least.  And it won’t be until the new better care fund money comes in in 2018 and 2019 that things begin to change.  But we see even the most optimistic assumption, we see an increase of just 0.6 of 1% average over the lifetime of the parliament against probably a need of around a 4% real terms increase just to stand still.  And we talk in the report about the limited impact of the precept, and to what extent councils can use that, not just this year as most have done, but every year for the next four years.  And then we have got the uncertainties of Brexit, the impact on the workforce, the impact on public finances.  And as Chris Hobson of NHS Providers said on the Marr show on Sunday, ‘Something has got to give’.  And that applies to social care as well as the NHS.

So where do we go from here? We kind of set out three potential and strategic challenges that need to be addressed, and these are not mutually exclusive. And the first is to ask the question well can councils continue to achieve more with less?  Can they deliver further savings?  Possibly, but we do not think that will close the funding gap in any shape or form.  So we are saying very clearly that the extra money the government has promised, the £1.5 billion in 2019, that is too little too late, at the minimum that should be brought forward to address some of the immediate pressures.  We are also saying that we need to accelerate progress to get the health and social care money working much more closely together, so there is a focus on people’s needs rather than separate organisational budgets.  And we highlight the increasing workforce problems of recruitment and retention, and again it is very, very surprising that we do not have an up to date coherent national workforce strategy to address some of those really big problems of recruitment and retention.

But we also say that if the government, and successive governments have struggled with this, if the government is unable or unwilling to fund the system properly, it needs to be much clearer, and perhaps a different offer in which it’s clear that primary funding responsibility sits with the individual and families, and that is actually where we are heading at the moment, with a fresh policy framework that encourages people to plan ahead, and possibly uses incentives to make them do that. A far from satisfactory approach in many ways, but nevertheless this is the scenario that is upon us. And controversially, we suggest that again if the government is not prepared to fund the system adequately, it needs to revisit some of those powers and duties in the Care Act that have placed extra expectations and responsibilities on local authorities, so they are better aligned with what the government is willing to fund.

And not least we are back to the big question of what kind of care, social care and healthcare, are we all going to need in the future? What does it cost, where does the money come from? And with apologies to the Great British Bake Off, both the social care and the NHS, we can’t have our cake and eat it, unless we have got the right ingredients, and we have worked out how to pay for them.  And unless politicians are able to come together and develop a shared approach to how we tackle some of these long term problems, then the situation will just get worse and worse.  And I think that concludes our findings.  Thank you.

Comments

Carole Augousti

Position
Manager Adult Day Centre,
Organisation
S.T.A.R.S Day Centre
Comment date
20 May 2019

As someone trying to provide a practical, flexible and quality service to older people [mainly with dementia] and their carers. this article only reinforces our everyday experience [ years after publication].
We run as a social enterprise keeping costs to a minumum but the Social care system is too inflexible and too poorly funded to understand/ acknowledge the "changing"! needs of dementia or fund appropriate care for those with dementia OR their carers. Keeping people out of full time care should be a priority but is too often the quick fix to avoid blocked beds [blocked not blocking - the bed is blocked by the system failure NOT the individual] . One of our biggest issues is the lack of information available to people about real and practical support they might access [we look on it as daily respite] and a lack of willingness to fund/ invest in services that are effective, proven and cost effective so as to widen their reach and scope. Those already providing services should be consulted about changes but rarely are and as for joined up thinknig - why do both the NHS and Social care have pathways . policies and strategies for older people and / or dementia - surely bthey should be integrated into one pathway ????

John Edward Flunder

Position
Retired,
Organisation
Bexley Pensioners Forum
Comment date
21 October 2018

The UK gave £13.4 Billion away in 2017 and this will increase to £14 Billion in 2020. In addition we pay the EU £13 Billion every year, less the rebate of £5 Billion they kindly give us back. When we finally leave the EU this £8 Billion will no longer be due. So with £21 Billion available the Cost of Care could be financed as well as safeguarding our NHS. The money is there - all we need is our MP'S to put the needs of their constituents before citizens of other countries. They are voted in to protect the interests of UK citizens so let them start doing it by
redirecting some of this £21 Billion back to our NHS and Social Care

John Edward Flunder

Position
Retired,
Organisation
Bexley Pensioners Forum
Comment date
21 October 2018

What was incorrect in my comments ?

Vincent Yeye

Position
Care,
Organisation
Health and Social Care
Comment date
14 October 2018

Some vulnerable adults may require complex needs and as a result, it will be culpable if they are neglected because of the cost of securing care home support. However, It would be better to seek the opinion of the service users and their families wishes and feelings to promote individual best interest before professionals make their decision.

Pearl Baker

Position
Carer/Independent Mental Health Advocate and Adviser,
Organisation
Independent
Comment date
26 September 2018

I really find it difficult to start my response: firstly we all pay National Insurance, based on our earning, those not in employment have their State Pension protected, however their are many 'working poor' who cannot survive' without visiting 'food banks' and 'handouts' from friends and family: to actually have a further 'compulsory' deduction from your already low wage, will have serious consequences. The United Nations are to Investigate the Increase in Poverty in the UK in November 2018, we should be ashamed.

I have recently attended a FOCUS group regarding CHC, commissioned by the NHS England, where this 'fits into this latest idea' is NOT clear.

Dementia is a HEALTH issue so where is the CHC.

It is clear' Care' needs to be provided closer to the COMMUNITY, smaller units, where family and friends could be part of their caring process (if they choose).

'ICS' should receive Government funding to allow the COMMISSIONING of these NEW smaller Residential/Nursing/Care UNITS, closer to the COMMUNITY. This should be included in ICS discussions re: 'integration'.

The LA should take over the STAFF recruitment and management of these HOMES.

There are many individuals who can't wait to help others for FREE.

The idea that these Nursing Homes are actually providing 'value' for money is a 'myth' £1495 a WEEK for sitting in a CHAIR with twenty other residents with the TV on is a disgrace, 'hard earned' SAVINGS gone in a 'wink'.

The current system is open to 'abuse' Financially and 'Physically' extra COMPULSORY payments by those left with hardly anything left to live on will have 'dire' consequences. Depression, Suicides will increase, and their younger family members will be the next generation to access the Mental Health System.

My idea is the only 'viable' one, it creates a better 'environment' closer access for family and friends (who can be included in the caring programme) lets be realistic, many CARERS and Friends visit as often as possible, why are they paying a Nursing Home £1495 a week, when they are there for hours, but 'charged' for the 'privilege'!

Residential Care is a BUSINESS and nothing more, STOP the 'GRAVY TRAIN' and bring it back 'in house'.

Linda Lawrence…

Position
HE Lecturer,
Comment date
19 March 2018

I agree with the last comment on the need to value those working in social care and to place a higher priority on caring for the vulnerable people in our society. I notice the policy implications include intention to place primary responsibility for funding with individuals and families. This is simply not fair or equitable that care will depend on how much money someone has to buy a service. Are we living in the USA with mainly privatised health and social care services? How long will it be before this is suggested for the NHS?

Linda Jane McLean

Position
Coordinator,
Organisation
Arac (Charity)
Comment date
06 February 2018

It is interesting that the "shortage of carers" is cited so frequently. All it takes is slightly different thinking. My local Social Work Department was surprised when I told them I was not looking for carers to support my mother to live at home. I was looking for Personal Assistants. Carers are task orientated, and will only do certain things. Quality of life can only be gained through personal assistance, where empathy is hooked, and you become a part of the individual's life.

Irene N Hardie

Position
Volunteer, adult mental health auditor,,
Organisation
CRCC Rethink/Mind
Comment date
05 September 2017
I have been doing independent hospital visiting for CRCC, but funds finished last October. Rethink is now only funded on a yearly basis : we had to form an independent group because we thought that the paid workers had to leave in February. Their contract was renewed for 1 year but the room had to be changed to a smaller one for economic reasons & may close next February. It is disgusting as all people, old or young have an uncertain service & virtually no support at all.

Shuaiba Ahammed

Position
CEO,
Organisation
http://www.yourcareandsupport.co.uk/
Comment date
26 August 2017
I agree with your opinion. The article is very helpful.

Tom McEwen

Position
Palliative care doctor,
Organisation
Local hospice
Comment date
10 January 2017
Because of a shortage of carers we cannot get patients looked after in their homes although funding is allocated to them. This is due to poor pay and a shortage of personnel, now worsened by the effects of Brexit. Care homes are also closing as funding is inadequate to pay staff wages and red tape has raised overheads. Patients in hospital are in the same "bed-blocking" quandary. This causes crises at the admission stage.

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