With autumn’s conference season over and Parliament back in full swing, leading charity Independent Age reflects on what has been learned during the past few months.
As politicians, delegates and stakeholders gathered in various cities around the UK for the 2015 party conferences, health and social care was understandably high on the agenda.
For Independent Age’s Head of Policy and Campaigns, Andy Kaye, one dominant theme that emerged was the pressure building on NHS services, despite the commitment to increasing funding over the coming years.
He says: “The Government has agreed to an NHS funding increase of £8bn above inflation by 2020, but that increasingly just doesn’t feel adequate to a whole range of stakeholders across health and social care. There was recognition throughout the party conferences that the NHS is under incredible financial pressure, but it is also facing the mounting pressure of more and more people needing their services as the population ages.
“So, I think there was a strong challenge back to the Government, that whilst the £8bn in extra funding is absolutely welcome, that in itself is not going to address all the challenges the NHS faces.”
Mr Kaye raises concerns around the looming £30bn black hole in the NHS’s finances, which will require a further £22bn in efficiency savings on top of the extra Government funding.
“I think what became really clear is that actually fewer and fewer people believe that is a target that can be reached by 2020,” he warns.
These issues were reflected in the recent Care Quality Commission Report, which identified underperforming health and care providers that were putting patients’ safety at risk.
The work pointed to lack of staffing, lack of leadership and difficulties around recruitment as impacting on the quality and safety of care.
Reflecting on the report’s finding Mr Kaye says: “It’s not rocket science. We need to make sure that care services in this country have strong leaders, the right skilled mix of staff providing care, and the right numbers. Vacancy rates in adult social care are much higher than in other professions and that is worrying.”
Many attendees at this year’s conference also restated the vital importance of better integrating health and social care in order to secure improved outcomes for patients and to save money.
However, Mr Kaye suggests that until the disparity in funding is resolved this aspiration may be undermined.
He says: “There are so many issues that remain unaddressed with regard to adult social care. It remains the Cinderella service.
“One of the significant influences on why so many people experienced such long waiting times last year in A&E and other parts of the hospital sector was because once people were placed in a bed in a hospital, particularly older people, there were so few places to discharge them to once they had recuperated.”
With regard to Home help, he adds that “there just isn’t the care package in place for people to return to when being discharged from hospital, and that is because £4.6bn has been cut from adult social care, with 400,000 fewer older and disabled people since 2010 receiving the support they need to go about their day to day lives.
“The NHS is ring-fenced and protected and funding is being made available to it. There is absolutely no guarantee whatsoever that at this year’s spending review adult social care will receive the same protection.”
Ahead of the forthcoming spending review Mr Kaye is urging Government to acknowledge this and change their approach.
He says: “We hope there will be a recognition in this year’s spending review that adult social care has been chronically underfunded, and if it wants to see the NHS performing effectively then it has got no choice but to make sure that people are getting the preventative help in the community first.
“We believe there is going to be a £4.3bn funding gap in adult social care by the end of this decade unless something is done in the next spending review.”
One of the way’s the charity is reinforcing this message is by gathering the views and accounts of older people on the health and care system.
The report, 2030 Vision: Building a better future for older people in the UK, brings together the findings of surveys and polls to present a realistic picture of older people’s experiences.
According to Mr Kaye the exercise was necessary to dispel the myths that taint public debate, including the assumption that many older people are “wealthy, sitting on vast amounts of housing equity and going on cruises all the time.”
In reality, he says, there are 1.6m older people living in poverty and many are fearful of the future as care services come under increasing financial pressures.
One of the reports main findings was that “people are not at all convinced and confident that the quality of care that they will need when they get to a certain age will be there. People don’t want to be institutionalised. They want to have choices.
“It’s really important that we listen older people and that policy makers don’t just sit in their ivory tower.
“We want to celebrate the fact that many people are living longer lives, but we need to make sure that we turn that into a positive for everyone. At the moment we are worried that when it comes to health and care services, poverty, loneliness and isolation, there are too many people that are very worried about the future.”
Independent Age is hopeful that these fears will be allayed if the important conclusions drawn from the recent conferences inform the upcoming spending review.