Does An Increase In Social Care Funding Allow For More Individually Tailored Care?

Does An Increase In Social Care Funding Allow For More Individually Tailored Care?

The latest government announcements on increases to social care funding, and the anticipated social care reform bill offer substantial possibilities for improving social care services.

One such area in need of reform is the planning and implementation of community care and support.

Providing community support can be a complex and multifaceted task. This is even more the case if people also have a mental health requirement.

However, it can and does deliver a demonstrably better quality of life for the care recipient, and frequently at a much-reduced cost compared to hospital situations.

How much of the increased funding do you think will actually reach social care providers, and with whatever funds do materialise, how transformative do you expect any social care reforms to be?

The Care Quality Commission (CQC) has recently published a report entitled ‘Home for Good’. This report highlights examples of people who are now flourishing in community services across England, having previously been placed in hospital settings.

These people’s lives measurably improved when they were afforded the opportunity to live in their own homes whilst being supported by a dedicated care team.

Given the pressures already extant in social care, do you think it is realistic to expect individualised support packages to become more widespread, and if so, how much extra funding and staffing would this require? Although there is no single reason as to why some instances of community support work better than others, there are some common factors.

To that end, several aspects that can lead to successful community support programmes have been identified.

The report argues that support services should be person-centred and designed around each individual's needs and aspirations.

It advises that a person being supported should be able to live in a home suitable for their circumstances, even if they have previously been hospitalised for sustained periods. It is believed that being around other distressed people can make a person’s own suffering worse.

As a consequence, the provision of good quality housing needs to be expanded. This could involve either building property specially, or substantial adaptation of existing properties.

Would having more people being supported in their own homes require better integration of health and social care to avoid unnecessary hospitalisation, and is this something that is achievable in the short-to-medium term?

Also, with constraints on property availability more generally, how much of any funding increase should go on procuring the necessary dwellings? The report also states that better collaboration between care providers, clinical and health professionals, and community teams, both during service planning and implementation is a necessity for effective community support.

The involvement of family, where appropriate, in the design and delivery of community support has also been found to increase the chance of a good outcome.

If there are to be large numbers of health and care staff leaving the industry over the coming months due to mandatory vaccination policies amongst other reasons, will an increase in funding make any tangible difference to the level of care and support that is actually deliverable?

The report recognises investing time, effort, and resources in getting community support right at the beginning increases the chances of lasting success.

Will there be sufficient vision and determination amongst government ministers and social care providers to strive for the type of care described in the report for most, if not all suitable recipients?

Or will the disconnect and bureaucracy between government and the health and social care sectors mean that the far-reaching reforms required to provide a bespoke community support service will not ever be realised?

Please let us know what you think in the comments, and Like the article if you found it interesting.

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