Last month’s Blog ‘Recruitment crises to last throughout the decade,’ highlighted the ever-worsening recruitment reality that social care providers have been facing for many years. Here we look at the consequences of this daily reality on the services, to the most vulnerable people living in our communities.
The ADASS (Association of Directors of Adult Social Services) recent survey highlighted 506,131 people were waiting for assessments, reviews, and/or care support to begin. Local authorities are responsible for delivering these services but 61% of councils have stated they are prioritising assessments and are only able to respond to people where abuse or neglect is highlighted, for hospital discharge. or after a temporary period of residential care, to support recovery and reablement.
ADASS goes on to state that levels of unmet, under-met or wrongly met needs are increasing, and the situation is worsening with people waiting longer for care assessments, reviews, care packages and personal budgets, while family carers are having to shoulder greater responsibility and are being expected to take paid or unpaid leave from work, when care and support are unavailable for their family members.
If taxpayers’ money cannot be used efficiently and effectively, to assess people in need in a timely manner and to get the help they desperately need now, then the system should be overhauled, for far too long have people been expected to suffer. The talk is always about lack of money, but maybe much of the discussion should centre on efficiency of output, results and systems. I believe our systems needed revising before COVID contributed to our problems; people were waiting weeks and months for assessments, and for the services they desperately needed, to commence.
ADASS chief executive Cathie Williams added: “Without action to prioritise care and support in people’s homes and local communities, it will take years, rather than months, to fully recover. We need a funded plan so we can ensure everyone gets the care and support they need, with more of the Health and Social Care Levy being used to fund care and support in people’s homes and communities over the next two years. People cannot wait for funding to trickle into adult social care and wider community services.”
If history tells us anything, people will be expected to wait and there will be little change to the efficiency and quality of this service. To think funding will suddenly stream into adult social care requires a lot of optimistic, positive thinking.
If I am delightfully surprised and the levy funding streams into adult social care to help people get timely assessments, reviews and care packages to enhance their quality of life, who is going to deliver the care package?
Almost 170,000 hours a week, of home care, couldn’t be delivered during the first three months of this year because of a shortage of care workers. That is a seven-fold increase since spring last year, so if we become efficient at assessing peoples’ needs then the number of people not receiving the service they are assessed as requiring, will only escalate and place untold pressures upon those already under extreme stress to cover a greater workload. This will inevitably lead to greater numbers of people leaving our sector because of the unacceptable working conditions they are required to endure.
I’ll give the last word to Sarah McClinton, ADASS president: “We have not seen the bounce back in services after the pandemic in the way we had hoped. In fact, the situation is getting worse rather than better. Social care is far from fixed. The health and social care reforms go some way to tackle the issue of how much people contribute to the cost of their care, but it falls short in addressing social care’s most pressing issues: how we respond to rapidly increasing unmet need for essential care and support and resolve the workforce crisis by properly valuing care professionals.”