Crisis in funding of social care

By the way Anja - reading my first sentence leaves me feeling I could be accused of being passive aggressive (never mention another thread of course). I do not mean to be pa. I simply wanted to stress that it wasn't practitioners who led these regrettable changes, but I suspect you know that.

Anja - I do hope you aren't including people like myself and Luckygirl in your reference to crass stupidity and egoism. We weren't in those higher echelons. I did manage a team for a couple of years, happy days but - I went back into practice in a specialist role to avoid the onset of expectation that we would manage budgets, ie cut services to our service users and say we were improving things. I understand I could be criticised for not staying and fighting but I'd have felt like the boy with his finger in the damn - changes were happening, no matter how much we practitioners on the ground shouted the changes were not positive.

My biggest concern is around supervision, support and training. At least when it was all in-house these standards were a given.

I agree about the care workers MissA. The ones who visit my mother are mainly nice but practices are not always good, and there have been some incidents which would have been recorded as serious if she’d been in hospital. Most are on low wage, inadequate supervision & training & expected to deal with things above their pay grade, including controlled drugs.

Some agencies pay travel time between clients, a lot don't, but social services are looking for the agency which will take on ever increasing workloads without sometimes even having the staff to cover shifts.
The women who came to my mum were lovely, for the most part, but they left a lot to be desired in the care practices.

Perhaps if they worked smarter they could better fund those in need.
I did hear that the care workers don't get paid for he time spent travelling between clients which is shocking.

I agree, more and more is expected of LAs but the funding is not being given to provide these services.

So much money is wasted by this outsourcing. An example: young man with severe behaviour problems housed in a privately run "specialist unit" which was just a house with two flats; there was no specialist input whatsoever and indeed the staff had no training in dealing with these sorts of problems and were so afraid of him that they just put his food on the stairs for him to pick up - and that was it - no guidance about jobs, benefits etc. - just nothing. The cost to the LA?.......£2,000 a week!

I only spent the last 8 years of my working life with the LA (actually the LEA) but it didn’t take long to suss out the crass stupidity and egoism at work there Iam

It wasn't helped at that time by the closure of small cottage hospitals which cared for people after acute illness, mostly elderly, who were not fit to return home. This area lost many beds with that cull. As usual it's about short term saving without long term planning. We are being sold the myth by the government of "improved patient care" with Future First at the moment, when in reality it's about cost saving. I am holding my breath for my mother's care package at home, on which she is totally dependent. Many do not realise the seriousness of the whole care sector unless they are involved first hand.

Over 30 years in l.a. and other government agencies Anja. I remember the 90's as you do and like many, joined in the resistance by Unions, to no avail.
As you say, anyone with any sense or commitment to good public services could see the writing on the wall.
It's simply deteriorated since then.

..workers were forced to accept different pay and conditions...

MissA and sometimes it is the ‘customer’ who is being ripped off as, if they can afford it, they have to pay for their own ‘care’ package.

Iam there was a move by LAs to outsource as much as they could at one time....refuge collection, home care packages, sell off Care Homes, etc.. They even paid ‘consultant agencies’ vast amounts to show them where they could ‘save money’!

This meant workers were forced to accept differentay and conditions, and there was less regulation, standards dropped, relations with workers deteriorated and so on.

False economy.

I was working for an LA at the time in the 1990s when this was becoming the thing to do. Any idiot could see what the end result would be, except that is the Council Officers and the Elected Councillors. The former simply wanted these services off-loaded and the latter hadn’t a clue.

If you’ve ever worked for local government you’ll know exactly what I’m talking about.

Thanks Miss A, I thought as much. Shocking isn't it. I've already said I know things weren't perfect when services were in house but, they were so much better than they are now.
So much depends on the relationships between service users and those providing the service. In our team, we had established contact with Mrs S over a number of years. The home carer was part of our team and if she said Mrs S was struggling, we'd re-assess. We had contact numbers for family members, sometimes they'd call into the office to see the case manager. Not perfect but person centred. I feel genuine despair at the way things have changed.

Yes, Iam, it was a care agency.
We couldn't understand how social services could be quite happy to pay for half 1.5 hours a day when actually getting sometimes 10 mins.

Anja - is it lazy accounting by la's?
I remember the pressure to close residential care homes and outsource services because it would be cheaper. Of course, it was never going to be cheaper because profits had to be made, it also lacks the quality that in house services had.
I agree bring the services back in house but, how do you d that when every year la's have their budgets cut by a government with no interest in quality and an ideological need to use private not public.
The private children's provision is massively expensive and offers very poor quality of care.

I simply doesn’t make sense that these services are outsourced to private companies who then make a profit

Lazy accounting by LAs.

Bring these services back in-house. Care Homes too.

MissA were those services from companies outsourced from the l.a.? I don't know any social work areas that provide their own home care these days, it's all had to be outsourced because their own staff have been made redundant (austerity)
My experience is as Luckygirl says, we worked in the same buildings, knew each other well and worked cooperatively to meet the needs of clients we also had known often over years. I'm not saying it was perfect but I'm certain it was better than current provision.

My mums care package was half an hour, three times a day.
Social services were rather irate when we pointed out that some visits were three minutes long.
Some days were condensed into 4 hours, with those breakfast, dinner and bedtime calls being made between those hours.
They didn't care.
Perhaps if they worked smarter they could better fund those in need.

Private equity firms buying and selling care homes to make money for their investors. You & Yours from 2018 on the financing of Four Seasons Care Homes:

www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/b09qb08h

Funding is key, but part of the problem lies in the outsourcing, which is based on political dogma and not on what is best for those in need of help. It is inefficient, detached, lacking commitment and a sense of pride and team working. It is simply massively inferior to the sort of services that we provided in house, as Iam says.

If I needed some help for a client, I walked down the corridor and talked to the home care organiser. If that care was not working well, I would knock on that same door and we would talk it through. I knew the monitoring and inspection procedures and had confidence in the services I was initiating.

The same with LA residential homes - we knew how they were run, monitored and the training and support that the staff were receiving. We were all pulling together to achieve the best.

It is a fragmented mish-mash now. How e claw our way back from this mess I do not know.

Thanks grannypauline, you’re right to add those essentials

Please include:utilities and railways.

The staffing issues are linked to pay and conditions. That’s linked to the fact private agencies want to make profits, understandably.
It’s my belief that education, criminal justice, social care and health care are areas that should be not for profit

Its not just about funding. It is also about staffing. The funding is often in place long before the care being started because there are no carers available.

I've also known people who self funded who couldnt get anyone, all the agencies could offer was wait lists.