Pensioners ‘passed like parcels’ by care agencies
According to the report of the Commons Health Committee published this week there is no joined up agenda for supporting the vulnerable elderly. The article explains.
The Government has committed to providing an additional £20 billion a year for social care by 2015, but the MPs say this is “not sufficient to maintain adequate levels of service quality and efficiency”. “Pursuing the ‘salami slicing’ of services, coupled with a failure to improve quality and efficiency through integration, will have very serious consequences for standards in both health and social care,” the report concludes.
Stephen Dorrell, Conservative chairman of the committee, said: “It is impossible to deliver either high quality or efficient services when the patient is passed like a parcel from one part of the system to another, without any serious attempt to look at their needs in the round.
This is a big issue for rural England with its skewed demography, one where local authorities have a major role to play and in my experience an area of policy with very limited sharing of good practice at the local level.