Social care is key to solving NHS crisis

It’s been a sad case of déjà vu to watch another winter crisis unfold in the NHS this year with A&E waiting lists soaring, nurses and ambulance workers striking and Covid-19 and flu adding to pressure on hospital beds.

In typical knee-jerk fashion, the government looked to care homes to bail out the NHS from the crisis by offering up to £250 million to fund thousands of short-term, step-down placements.

Care homes have been called on to help prop up the NHS despite suffering their own recruitment and retention challenges as the sector continues to be treated as the Cinderella service.

On the positive side, the emergency call to care homes has once again highlighted their crucial role and the interdependence of health and social care. The worst bedblocking crisis in memory in the NHS has largely been due to a lack of available care packages caused by the staffing crisis in social care. As a result, thousands of vulnerable people continue to lie in hospital beds because they’ve nowhere else to go.

Furthermore, the NHS crisis has once again brought into stark relief the need for a fair, long-term funding settlement for social care, with the sector calling for minimum weekly fees of £1,500 to match the cost of care of taking in hospital discharges.

While we continue to lurch from crisis to crisis due to the government’s shorttermist approach to health and social care, the latest meltdown has at least highlighted, again, the dependence of the NHS on a well-functioning social care system and brought into the public arena how much good-quality care actually costs.

With local authorities expected to publish the results of their cost of care exercises this month, despite the government having again kicked reforms into touch, the NHS crisis has underscored the urgent need to tackle the social care staffing crisis immediately –and get long-term reforms of the system back on track.

Lee Peart Editor-in-chief Caring Times