Councils get emergency £25m for social care to tackle hospital blockages
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Version 0 of 1. Ministers have approved an emergency injection of £25m for social care for older people in areas where hospitals are facing the biggest problems of delayed patient discharges. The new cash is going to 65 councils in England this week and must be spent by the end of March. The councils will have to show how they have eased pressure on their local hospitals. The move, authorised by a special ministerial committee that is meeting weekly to try to stop the NHS tipping into a full-blown winter crisis, is seen as belated recognition in government that social care is an integral part of the health system. David Pearson, president of the Association of Directors of Adult Social Services (Adass), said: “The penny seems to be dropping that there is a connection. Growing numbers of people are talking about cuts in social care.” According to NHS England, one in five hospital beds was occupied over the Christmas period by someone ready for discharge but unable to move on because of blockages in the system. About a third of these blockages were attributed to lack of social care services. Although councils have sought to protect social care from the worst of the cuts forced on local government since 2010, Adass says it has suffered an average 12% cash reduction while absorbing a 14% rise in demand because of the rapidly ageing population. It is estimated that about 250,000 fewer people in England are receiving social care services from their council than five years ago. The emergency £25m is being provided through the Department of Health to councils where the local hospital has been identified as having the most delayed discharges per head of population. The average cash boost is £380,000, but larger councils will receive more. Because the money is a one-off and must be spent immediately, councils will use it largely to buy in extra services such as care agency support for people in their own homes and short-term places in residential homes. The 65 councils – about four in 10 of the total – are being told they must report to the department on exactly how the cash is spent and how many people they have enabled to leave hospital. Any continuing support beyond 1 April will have to be funded from existing budgets. Pearson said the extra funding was welcome and a highly significant move, but he was pressing for further help for all councils with responsibility for social care. “It’s estimated there will be three million people living with three or more long-term conditions by 2018. We are currently able to help only 1.3 million of those and the number has been going down.” It was a measure of how seriously social care was now being taken in government, Pearson said, that he had been invited to attend the weekly special ministerial committee, which is chaired by the health secretary, Jeremy Hunt, and attended by the communities secretary, Eric Pickles, and the minister for government policy, Oliver Letwin. The Labour party has pledged to bring social care in England into the NHS if it wins the general election in May. |