I can well understand that she wanted him to stay at home, but even a very good nursing home wouldn’t have cost anything like £16,000 a week. Sadly I don’t see why the state should be expected to fund anyone’s very expensive preferences in such cases.
As for the difference between social and nursing care, as I understand it, social care - as in washing, dressing, help with eating and drinking, and ‘toileting’ as they like to call it, can be provided by a person with no qualifications except (we would hope) a kind and caring nature.
Whereas anywhere calling itself a ‘nursing’ home must have a qualified nurse always on duty for those procedures that need a trained professional.
IMO there’s often confusion, because (as I saw when a frequent visitor to a forum for carers of people with dementia) so many people mistakenly refer to any standard residential care home as a ‘nursing’ home.