UK social care system failing most vulnerable

http://www.theguardian.com/society/2015/sep/09/uk-social-care-system-failing-most-vulnerable

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The health and social care problems besetting our four nations are depicted clearly in microcosm in Polly Toynbee’s perceptive analysis of the situation at Addenbrooke’s hospital in Cambridge (The long read, 2 September). We see the impact the last five years have had on our services, all directly caused by the ideological bias of our two most recent secretaries of state for health. This includes the failure to plan the future NHS workforce properly, the cutting of local authorities’ budgets almost to the quick (though all the while forcing them to turn to expensive private agencies to cover the resulting staff deficit), a lack of respect and compassion for the needs of frail, elderly people languishing in dirty linen at home and in hospital, and a continuing, almost total, dependency on private care home chains largely owned by hedge funds and private equity companies, many of which are perilously close to going out of business at any moment.

One interesting point that Polly does not make, however, is that in Scotland, the SNP government has quietly done away with NHS continuing-care funding altogether for people living at home or in care homes. It is now restricted to hospitals – where it would have been covered by the NHS all along and is called “hospital-based complex clinical care”. If you live in Scotland and want to be cared for at home, even though you require the equivalent of NHS continuing care, you’ll be means-tested and probably subjected to the same inadequate, but expensive, care that “less ill” people already endure under existing community care policies. I hope Jeremy Hunt doesn’t get wind of this - if he does, it will no doubt be next on his list of “efficiency savings”.Gillian DalleyLondon

• I read with interest and increasing anger John Ransford’s article about dealing with the elderly care crisis (Society, 2 September). Some of his views are laudable, but there is one problem that is constantly ignored when caring for the elderly in their own homes is talked about. I care for my husband, who has dementia; he is 81 and I am 68, not in good health either, I would add. We have been married some 12 years and his dementia began to manifest when we had been together no more than three years. I want to say, what about me? Who cares for me when I am ill?

Silence is the answer. As one memory clinic nurse said to me: “We have to keep you well.” So I must be well in order to care for my husband. Who has the right to say that one life should be traded for another? Why should my needs and desires and hopes be subsumed by the need to care for this extremely difficult elderly man? Of course it would be better for people to be cared for in their own home, but at what cost, I would ask – and I am not talking here in financial terms. Name and address supplied

• Polly Toynbee’s article accurately reflects our experience. My mother died in January after two and a half years in a privately run nursing home. Her care was mainly good, but the services offered and their quality markedly declined during that period. One of many concerns was the company’s finances and the potential for asset-stripping, something that would have been virtually impossible in a council-run home. Nor would there have been the ever-present threat of the business closing. If this happens, it will be the council that will pick up the pieces. The system is unfair (full-fee-payers subsidise those being paid for by the state), unsustainable and desperately needs overhauling.

It’s surely not beyond us to calculate the costs of care and for those resources to be made available so that our most vulnerable, mostly elderly people are looked after to a standard that befits a civilised society. It needs courage and commitment at all levels, especially within government, to argue the case for a properly funded (from taxes if necessary) care system worthy of our older generation. Someone in every family will almost certainly need this support.Jane WoodfordSheffield