Future Of Social Care Research Articles

Book Review: People Before Profit: The Future of Social Care in Scotland by Social Work Action Network (SWAN) & the Jimmy Reid Foundation

Book Review: <i>People Before Profit: The Future of Social Care in Scotland</i> by Social Work Action Network (SWAN) &amp; the Jimmy Reid Foundation

What Kind of Brexit do Voters want? Lessons from the Citizens’ Assembly on Brexit

AbstractThe Citizens’ Assembly on Brexit was a major exercise in deliberative public engagement conducted in autumn 2017. It brought together fifty randomly selected members of the public for two carefully structured weekends of listening, learning, reflecting and discussing. Assembly members considered what post‐Brexit arrangements the UK should pursue, focusing on trade and migration. On trade, most members wanted the UK to pursue a bespoke arrangement with the EU and rejected the option of leaving the EU with no deal. On migration, most wanted the UK to maintain free movement of labour while using already available policy levers to reduce immigration numbers. These findings provide unique insight into informed public opinion on vital, pressing policy questions. The Assembly also illustrates the valuable role that such deliberative exercises could play in UK democracy. We suggest they could be particularly helpful for unlocking progress on issues such as the future of social care, that are often felt to be ‘too difficult’ to handle.

Progress in Building Integration: Lessons from Great Britain, Northern Ireland and the Basque Country

The integration of health and social care has been a constant policy goal of successive UK governments for over 40 years and is a contemporary priority now supported in Great Britain by legislation. It has been noted that the ‘imperative to integrate and transform has never been greater’ (NHS Confederation/Local Government Association, 2016). The main rationales for the importance of integration have also been largely accepted relating to; a holistic approach; facilitating a more person centred approach; producing a better experience and outcomes for users; reducing the complexity of organisational divisions, responding to more complex conditions and delivering more effective and efficient use of resources. Integration is also accepted as an appropriate response to increasing demands on both health and social care services. The challenges to transforming delivery are a consequence of well-established factors. Demographic change, with larger numbers of older people, changes in life expectancy, the needs of people with multiple health problems and complex conditions and large increases in the numbers of older people without a child to care for them if needed. The importance of integration has also been enhanced by the broader direction of change relating to health provision and the desirability of making a shift from acute hospital provision and institutional care to more community based provision covering community health services and social care. Integration is thus part of the envisaged transformation in care in health related areas. Other challenges have come from the impact of economic recession and austerity policy with reductions in the funding resources and increasing costs of services. The task of producing effective integrated care involves in Great Britain bringing together two separate institutional configurations, the NHS and local authority social services and also developing the delivery of integrated services and integrated practice. Numerous policy and delivery initiatives have been developed but generally progress has been piecemeal and limited. The Commission on the Future of Social Care (2014) noted the compelling case for bringing health and social care together, enabling better alignment of the two systems and leading to transformational change. In 2015 much closer integration of health and social care was identified as one of the three major challenges faced by the NHS (Ham, 2015). The Nuffield Trust (2015) has identified five factors to pursue in improving UK health care, each of which relates to integrated approaches, the NHS and social care reform; the quality of care; the workforce; new models of care delivery and older people and complex care. The existing, research on integrated care concludes that there is no one size fits all for achieving this ambition for integration, although factors such as leadership, financial incentives, clinical pathways and aligned IT systems have emerged as significant factors. This paper draws on the authors’ experiences of health and social care in Northern Ireland and the Basque country to suggest the key factors that drive transformation in healthcare systems and ensure that they achieve their full potential.

The Future of Social Care: Change, Retrenchment or Sustainability?

10.5042/jic.2010.0372 were no longer live. Twenty-two new bills were announced in a radical Queen’s Speech. The Prime Minister appointed ‘hardliners’ to key welfare positions: Ian Duncan Smith, Lord Freud and, as Welfare Czar, former Labour Minister Frank Field. The welfare bill for which they are responsible emphasises radical reform of the benefits system, reducing fraud and getting people (including many social care service users) off benefits, particularly the old incapacity benefits. Not a trace of hesitation here. What then can we expect from a government which seems to be epitomised by the inequality of its partners and their previous lack of consensus on social care? It may be helpful here to look back to where we were just before the election. At that point, social care was a high-profile issue – even though it got little mention during the month of election campaigning. The Liberal Democrats, through their then spokesperson Norman Lamb, were seeking commitment to consensus building and a sustainable approach to funding social care. The Conservatives, represented by Andrew Lansley, now Secretary of State, steadfastly refused to enter into cross-party negotiation, attacked the Government for its ‘death tax’ and opted instead for ‘free’ residential care which critics saw as incentivising institutionalisation. The Coalition’s proposed commission does not offer the same promise as Labour’s White Paper predecessor of ruling in all funding options, referring instead Two big questions currently face all those concerned with the future of social care. What chance now that a sustainable system of funding, and a person-centred system of support, will be put in place? In trying to make sense of the current coalition government’s approach, we are likely to get a clearer idea of social care’s longer-term future from looking at the origins of its proposals than we are from trying to interpret the entrails of its text. The Coalition Programme’s brief statement on social care contained only one fact: the establishment of a commission to report within a year. Remember 1997 and the image of Tony Blair greeted by cheering crowds after gaining a landslide victory with unprecedented public support and a massive mandate for a new politics to replace 18 years of Conservative government? Yet for two years there was minimal change, with no increase in public expenditure. Deference to the right-wing press, the city and financial institutions continued, some would say, through the whole life of New Labour administrations. In sharp contrast, in 2010 David Cameron, leader of a party which did not even have an overall House of Commons majority, confirmed within days of his appointment as Prime Minister swingeing spending cuts, and major proposals for reform. The immediate £6 billion package of cuts announced made clear that any promises of ring-fencing front-line workers and services The Future of Social Care: Change, Retrenchment or Sustainability?

The Future of Social Care: Providing Services and Creating Social Capital

The Future of Social Care: Providing Services and Creating Social Capital

Future of social care

Future of social care

Explaining about … individual budgets and self‐directed support

As life expectancy continues to rise and people's expectations of the services they receive also increases, it has become apparent that the current social care system needs a dramatic overhaul. In 2003, In Control recognised this need for fundamental changes to the system and launched its first pilot of individual budgets and the concept of self‐directed support. In our first article, Louise Close explains how these early ideas have developed into a clear and common purpose for the future of social care in this country.

Welsh debate the future of social care.

On November 11, Wales began a national debate on how to pay for social care in the future. Amid warnings of a £360 million funding gap in social services in 20 years' time, the Welsh public is being asked to consider how much they are willing to contribute from their personal finances to social care.

Telecare and the future of social care

Abstract This paper explains the benefits of adopting telecare within a social care setting, how it enhances quality of life for both users and carers, and how it cuts costs for social services and healthcare providers.

Prevention is better than cure

No sooner than the fireworks stopped for New Year, both Government and Opposition began setting out their visions for health policy in England. All have focused not just on the traditional health policy territories of the way the NHS is managed, but on the future of social care and the prevention agenda.

Policy change and policy dilemmas: interpreting the community services White Paper in England.

In 2006 the Labour Government in England published its long awaited White Paper on 'community services', following on from the 2005 Green Paper on the future of social care. The policy envisages an unprecedented shift of activity and resources from acute care to community settings, along with a much stronger focus on preventive care. Several mechanisms are to be put in place to ensure this shift takes place, most notably practice-based commissioning, payments-by-results and enhanced partnership working. This article outlines the intended changes and assesses the extent to which they add up to a coherent strategy. It is argued that although there is widespread support for the overall vision, the strategy contains some difficult policy tensions that are common to other welfare systems. These will have to be addressed if the vision is to be a reality.

Choosing Care: Dilemmas of a Social Market

The Department of Health's Green Paper, Independence, Well‐being and Choice (2005) is subtitled ‘our vision for the future of social care for adults in England’. This article will use the lens of a personal experience of caring to reflect upon its proposals. It does so within the wider context of recent debates on the potential for a human rights culture within community care. The article begins with an outline of the Green Paper itself and then moves on to the case study. Thereafter, the discussion considers the wider issues which are raised by this example of community care for vulnerable adults. The concept of independence, expressed as user choice in a social market of care, is central to the Green Paper. Market provision involves contractual relations, yet the Green Paper is not framed within an explicit discourse of rights. Instead, the vision of market‐based independence is to be achieved through improved policies and practices by social care providers and through the development of appropriate public regulatory mechanisms. In line with recent feminist critiques of present welfare provision, critiques that are based on an ethic of care, I conclude that the starting point for policy and legal development should be the necessary interdependence of individuals.

All change? Please!

Last month, the Institute for Public Policy and Research (IPPR) published a weighty tome on the future of social care. Among its recommendations was that local government could take responsibility for commissioning both health and social services, with the NHS becoming the main provider (but not purchaser) on the health side (Kendall and Harker 2002).