Many disabled adults and seniors lacking the ability to wash themselves are having to tough it out, reported BBC’s programme, 5 Live investigates.
Almost all UK councils, or 90%, claim they can’t meet portions of their adult social service needs due to budget cuts amounting to £3.5 billion, a 26% reduction, warned David Pearson, director of the Association of Directors of Adult Social Services (ADASS).
An estimated 5,000 weakened adults have seen services dropped. “Typically this will be people who have difficulties in one our two areas of their daily life, such as washing, dressing,” said Pearson.
The number of aged people in care dropped in the last seven years from 1.2 million to 900,000, reports UK newspaper, The Independent.
The government’s National Audit Office has also warned that, in spite of the country’s need for social services increasing, the amount available for care is falling.
NHS programme takes on elder care
In the government’s money-saving scramble, it globbed social services’ elder care and NHS services together, gifting an amount equivalent to social services losses to the NHS in the £3.8 billion Better Care Fund.
The government is sticking the already-crunched NHS with the task of setting up home visits from weak and frail care teams and telephone services in some places, reducing overheads and encouraging elders to ‘manage their own conditions at home.’ The idea is ‘increasing the number of patients treated at home rather than in a bedded facility.’
It’s hoped it will reduce hospital admissions by 3.5 percent and avoid ‘older people are increasingly arriving in A&E with avoidable conditions’, in part by shifting them to – other places run by the NHS.
In Kent, ‘Patients will have access to 24/7 community-based care…but do not need to go to hospital where this is appropriate’. In Greenwich the fund will ‘respond(s) to emergencies to which they are alerted within the community at care homes, A&E and through GP surgeries (and dealt with) through treatment at home or through short-term residential care.’
A&E cuts are likely to be the same people who have been at some point affected by social services cuts, showing an already strained elder-care system is set to take on even more.
Read the original article on Basic Income UK.
Photo Credit: Gary Knight
