Joined-up care: a prescription

Yet, unless the conclusions of today’s powerful Parliamentary report are heeded, it is a test that England will fail unless the Government introduces a joined-up care system – and bites the bullet on funding.

Even though an extra £2bn will be made available by 2014-15, it will be difficult for health professionals – and individual families for that matter – to plan ahead unless a concrete decision is taken on whether care costs should be capped at £35,000, the central tenet of the Dilnot Commission and a policy endorsed by, amongst others, the Archbishop of York.

And, once this issue has been reconciled, it is imperative that the Government looks to ensure that this “Cinderella service” is better co-ordinated at both a local and a national level.

For, while the headline NHS budget has increased, albeit marginally, under the coalition, the preference of Ministers to open new hospitals and facilities masks the state of social care.

Funding for elderly care comes from four main sources – NHS trusts, local authorities, social housing and the availability, or otherwise, of carers.

Yet each area is already stretched to the limit, even before competing priorities are taken into account, with senior citizens having to endure a “diminished quality of life”, according to the Health Select Committee, because of the manner in which the budgets of these departments are being “salami-sliced” in a cackhanded manner that is taking insufficient account of the long-term consequences.

It is a mindset that needs to change. They key to joined-up services, according to committee chairman Stephen Dorrell, a former Health Secretary, is joined-up commissioning that pools resources and enables the needs of a whole region to be taken to account.

It should be a no-brainer for a government that supposedly believes in both localism and a streamlined public sector. The question is whether it has the political willpower or inclination to do so.