Care strategy poised for review as elderly population booms

OUTDATED care homes in a Yorkshire city could be replaced with new multi-million pound facilities under a radical shake-up to cope with the soaring demand for health services for the elderly.

York Council announced plans yesterday for a city-wide review of its nine residential care homes amid predictions that the number of people aged over 65 is expected to increase by nearly a quarter in less than a decade.

The review represents the biggest overhaul of care services in York for half a century after the network of the existing facilities was built during the 1960s and 1970s.

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A five-year vision is being drawn up to reduce the number of hospital and care home admissions.

The move has come after organisations such as Age UK petitioned the council to try to ensure more pensioners can stay in their own homes.

Under the proposals unveiled yesterday, the council would need to secure as much as £13.4m to finance the construction of new facilities on three sites which have been identified to provide specialist care.

While the council is battling to counter the Government’s funding cutbacks, senior councillors maintained the review is not financially driven. York Council is faced with making multi million pound cutbacks over the next few years.

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The council’s deputy leader and cabinet member for health, housing and adult social services, Councillor Tracey Simpson-Laing, said: “This is not simply about finance, this is about providing sufficient standards of care at a time when demand for services is increasing.

People are telling us that they want to remain in their own homes wherever possible, and we will endeavour to do this. We want to move away from the idea of institutional care while increasing the provision of specialist facilities for conditions such as dementia.”

The council’s existing nine care homes cost about £7m to run each year and provide a total of 276 beds. However, 190 of the beds are for general care, with only 86 beds available for specialist care for people with conditions such as dementia.

There has been a major shift in the last decade in the level of need of people admitted to residential care. As people’s life expectancy has increased and they are able to stay at home longer, those admitted to residential care are often more physically frail.

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The proposed new structure could see up to 180 high dependency beds and 20 respite beds created to help cope with the need for more specialist care.

An extra £500,000 is being invested during this financial year to provide telecare technology for as many as 500 people. The telecare systems involve ultra-sensitive motion sensors which can detect falls in the homes of pensioners, ensuring they do not need to be admitted to care units.

York Council has drawn up a series of options which will be the focus of a three-month consultation that will be launched after it is approved at a cabinet meeting next Tuesday.

The options include retaining the status quo, extending and renovating existing homes and buying in services from the private sector as well as building new homes.

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One of the biggest issues is the size of the existing care homes, the majority of which are not big enough to be re-developed. But two sites at Fordlands and Haxby Hall have been deemed adequate in size to build new facilities on. A third location – the council-owned site at the former Lowfield School in Acomb – could be used to build a new “care village” that would provide a total of 90 beds.

The consultation is set to include events in the city’s supermarkets as well as leaflets distributed to York’s libraries and the current users of care facilities.

Latest figures show there are 33,000 people aged over 65 living in the city. This number is expected to increase to 37,000 within the next four years and then to 40,100 by 2020.