The Reality of the Domiciliary Care Financial Crisis
May 10, 2017
Our Business Risk Adviser and adult care pundit, Nick Hood has set out the stark financial prospects for the UK’s embattled domiciliary care sector in an article for leading industry magazine, Care Management Matters.
The BBC1 Panorama programme, Britain’s Home-Care Crisis, broadcast in March, laid bare the plethora of problems besetting the UK’s homecare sector.
The impact of resource constraints was set out for all to see. There were tales of social care recruitment and staff retention issues and warnings of worse times to come from local authorities and other organisations, including the United Kingdom Homecare Association.
With the support of financial health monitoring specialists, Company Watch, Opus had worked closely with the producers of the Panorama programme for six months prior to it being broadcast, providing them with statistics on the sector. This was essentially the financial bedrock on which the programme rested.
The headline-grabbing point we made was that over one in four (27% in fact) of all the homecare providers in the UK are at serious risk of failure. This is a threat, which has systemic implications, not just for domiciliary care, but for the whole care system.
As the care industry is well aware, but as successive governments have seemed unable to grasp, the various sub-sectors of health and social care are interwoven in a complex web of interdependency. If domiciliary care is not available for the elderly and vulnerable, this puts pressure on NHS resources, including A&E admissions and delayed transfers of care. Added to that, it also stresses the residential care sector, which is in the grips of a very similar crisis, both in terms of capacity and finances.
This illustrates one of the most serious problems underlying the current situation: the existence of entrenched silos within the system. The NHS, domiciliary care providers, care home operators and their paymasters in local and central government can all be driven by their own agendas and guard their independent budgets……
To read the full Care Management Matters article, click on the link below: