Social Care
Debate between Baroness Keeley and Norman Lamb(8 years, 5 months ago)
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Barbara Keeley
My hon. Friend is right, and I shall come to that point shortly.
Carers UK reports that insufficient support from health and social care services is leaving the carers who are doing all that extra work
“isolated, burnt-out and unable to look after their own health.”
The Richmond Group of Charities published the story of Susan. She cares for her husband Bruce, who has been diagnosed with both Parkinson’s and dementia. The struggle that Susan underwent to find quality care is one about which I have been hearing from carers for some time. She was provided with respite care from a care home which was of such low quality that her husband was unrecognisable when she returned for him:
“He hadn’t been shaved, he couldn’t walk, and his eyes were crusted…with blepharitis.”
When Susan managed to get home care for her husband, it was also poor quality. She said:
“They didn’t know what they were doing. It seemed like they’d never cared before. They turned up at five o’clock in the afternoon to put my husband to bed. Or they turned up at ten, once I’d already helped him to bed. Absolutely awful.”
It is also telling how carers like Susan feel when dealing with the challenges of negotiating complex and fragmented care systems. She “felt small” and she said:
“You go in there, and you’ve got no idea about anything, about care. It’s like going in on the first day at school.”
Susan is not a rare case of a carer battling to get respite care or home care of an acceptable quality. Carers UK tell us that three out of 10 carers in its survey have experienced a change in the amount of care and support services that they receive. Six out of 10 of those carers experiencing a change said the amount of care and support received had been reduced.
Norman Lamb (North Norfolk) (LD)
The hon. Lady argues for bringing forward funding, and I agree. Does she agree, however, that that is not enough in itself and that all of us on both sides of the House must confront the chronic underfunding of the health and care system, and we need to find ways to raise significantly more resources to ensure we have a modern and efficient health and care system?
Barbara Keeley
I agree, and our motion talks about the need for
“a longer-term settlement to ensure that the social care system is sustainable going forward”.
We absolutely do need that.
On quality of care, I was talking about Susan finding a care home and it giving inadequate care. There are too many such care homes. In its 2016 “State of Care” report, the Care Quality Commission said that when it makes a return visit to a service originally rated as “inadequate”, one quarter of those services were not able to improve their ratings. Susan found poor-quality home care, and last week the ombudsman reported that the number of complaints about homecare is rising and that the number of complaints upheld by the ombudsman is also rising.