FREEZING NHS spending to invest in care at home for elderly people would help cut unnecessary hospital admissions and free up ward staff to focus on other priorities, according to private care providers.
Ranald Mair, chief executive of Scottish Care, said freezing investment in the NHS was politically taboo, but the money could improve the quality of life for people in their own homes and reduce demand on hospitals.
Speaking ahead of the publication of a report on care at home for the elderly, he said: "The evidence suggests that maintaining NHS expenditure whilst cutting social care, simply results in more unnecessary admissions to hospital."
The report, Home Delivery, commissioned by Scottish Care, the representative body for the country's independent social care services, was written by social care consultant Barry McLeod and Dr Mari Mair, former advisor to Glasgow City Council and Cosla.
It highlights startling statistics about the relative costs of NHS care and care at home. When a pensioner suffers a fall and ends up in hospital they end up with an 11.8-day average stay, costing the NHS almost £5,000, it says, but the same money could pay for a person to stay for more than nine weeks in a residential care home or give care at home for a week to more than 27 OAPs.
The report says so-called bed-blocking accounted for more than 91 bed days in the quarter April to June 2014, at a cost which could have provided a year's average care at home package for 4,042 clients or a year's residential care for over 1,300 clients.
The authors identify "great potential" in terms of money spent on delayed discharges or bed blocking being diverted into services in the community.
But it says care at home in the community is currently is under pressure, with more hours of care at home being provided but a dramatic fall in the number of people who receive public funding to meet non-personal support needs such as cleaning and shopping.
Councils contract out 60 per cent of all care home services, whereas they used to provide 70 per cent in-house, the report states. However staff are largely part-time, older and pay rates are lower than the Scottish average.
Mr Mair said: "It could be the time for politicians to tackle this head-on. With an increasingly ageing population, the problems will get worse as demands on the NHS increase. Investment in social care provides the public purse with more bang for our buck."
Mr Mair said: "The Scottish Government concedes that care services in Scotland are under considerable strain as resources are squeezed and the demographic challenge increases.
"The Scottish Government has made additional funding available to the new Health and Social Care Partnerships to tackle the problem. But we need to ensure that social care provision including Care at Home and Housing Support is adequately funded on a sustainable basis."
He said the government's target in 2011 had been to double the capacity in home care over a 10-year period, but progress had been slow: "We are now behind schedule on this target and need a national plan to ensure we have the right quality and quantity of home care going forward."
The report will be published today at Scottish Care's Care at Home and Housing Support Conference in Glasgow.
Why are you making commenting on The Herald only available to subscribers?
It should have been a safe space for informed debate, somewhere for readers to discuss issues around the biggest stories of the day, but all too often the below the line comments on most websites have become bogged down by off-topic discussions and abuse.
heraldscotland.com is tackling this problem by allowing only subscribers to comment.
We are doing this to improve the experience for our loyal readers and we believe it will reduce the ability of trolls and troublemakers, who occasionally find their way onto our site, to abuse our journalists and readers. We also hope it will help the comments section fulfil its promise as a part of Scotland's conversation with itself.
We are lucky at The Herald. We are read by an informed, educated readership who can add their knowledge and insights to our stories.
That is invaluable.
We are making the subscriber-only change to support our valued readers, who tell us they don't want the site cluttered up with irrelevant comments, untruths and abuse.
In the past, the journalist’s job was to collect and distribute information to the audience. Technology means that readers can shape a discussion. We look forward to hearing from you on heraldscotland.com
Comments & Moderation
Readers’ comments: You are personally liable for the content of any comments you upload to this website, so please act responsibly. We do not pre-moderate or monitor readers’ comments appearing on our websites, but we do post-moderate in response to complaints we receive or otherwise when a potential problem comes to our attention. You can make a complaint by using the ‘report this post’ link . We may then apply our discretion under the user terms to amend or delete comments.
Post moderation is undertaken full-time 9am-6pm on weekdays, and on a part-time basis outwith those hours.
Read the rules hereComments are closed on this article