Health and social businesses need more support from new government: Gillian Smith

Most of this is provided by private care companies such as my own and this is only set to increase as the demand for social care becomes greater over the next few years.

In the main, provision of this kind helps to keep people in their own homes. Not only has this been shown to lead to better clinical outcomes, it also helps reduce the burden on healthcare services and lowers the numbers of people requiring NHS hospital beds or places in residential care homes.

As private care providers, we provide everything from help with shopping, to physical therapy, the administration of medication, end-of-life care and help with complex needs.

We have always invested in high-quality and regular training for all our care staff but, increasingly, this is essential in a landscape where we are expected to take on roles and responsibilities that would have historically been kept solely within the NHS.

It isn’t that we aren’t happy to do this. I started Care2Care Yorkshire precisely because I wanted to ensure that adults were provided with high-quality, consistent and respectful care. But year on year we are subject to the competing demands of government budgets and social care expectations, and are being required to provide more clinical provision, more time with clients, and more complex care, with budgets that have in real terms dropped over time and legislative restrictions that can be both expensive and complicated.

This is a major social issue and, in many communities, a ticking time bomb, with the demand for care far outstripping the private sector’s ability to provide it. And yet health and social care was not a major topic of discussion for any of the political parties on the run up to the election, and manifesto commitments on it have been woolly and outdated.

It is a much-cited fact that the UK has an ageing population. In Yorkshire and Humber, the number of people aged 65 or older is set to increase by a third by 2040. We look after people with a range of conditions at Care2Care Yorkshire, including people who have been through life-changing accidents, those living with conditions such as MND and MS, to people with challenging mental health conditions.

A major proportion of the people we help, though, are elderly and it is clear that the demand for care around conditions such as dementia and Alzheimer’s is only going to become greater over the next 10 years.

So much time and money could be saved if the balance was shifted towards organisations and agencies working in partnership rather than at odds with each other. This would remove, for example, numerous procedures being unnecessarily repeated and better communication between the different care providers, meaning that more people in need could get what they require — high-quality , consistent care that maintains dignity and respect.

That is, after all, why anyone enters into this kind of business in the first place, and it’s high time the government turned its attention to making sure this sector can continue to support social care in a way that is required for the future of a healthy and kind society.