Much has been made of the tough choices Liberal Democrats have had to make since we entered government. But not enough has been made of the victories we’ve gained. Unlike the last Labour administration, this coalition is delivering on its promises to reform health and social care for the better.
Let’s start with social care. The funding of care and support is one of the most urgent of all social policy issues we face as a society. Make no mistake; the way we organise and pay for care for older and disabled people is a broken. That’s why we’re taking action to fix it. The Spending Review was much more than a budget cutting exercise. It was an exercise in reform and priority setting. Amongst all the hype and hyperbole of cuts, was a commitment to invest £2billion in social care by 2014/15. Half of this money will be given to the NHS to spend on social care services such as reablement, which will help reduce the number of elderly people that are readmitted to hospital each year. Our aim: to kick start the long sought joining up of health and social care. Meanwhile the other £1billion will go direct to local councils to help deal with the demographic and cost pressures, which impact on healthcare.
During the summer, we also took the first step to honouring our commitment to introduce a new per-patient funding system for all hospices and providers of palliative care. We also confirmed that £40 million will be invested to help hospices improve the environments where they provide care and support for patients, their families and carers.
Labour’s response to problems was to make everything either compulsory or prohibited. The coalition government is moving away from one-dimensional, like-it-or-lump-it health services to a system where the patient and service user is in the driving seat. Even in these tough economic times, we are providing carers and the people they care for with the freedom to make their own choices by extending the roll out of personal budgets and giving direct payments to carers, so that they will have real control over their lives with better access to respite care.
With very little fanfare, we have demonstrated our commitment to tackling the prejudices and problems associated with mental health. Unlike Labour, we will put mental health on an equal footing with physical health. That is why we have committed £70million this year to give more people the opportunity to access talking therapies. This funding will help tackle the devastating human cost of mental health by ensuring that the right action is taken early in people’s lives.
Dealing with the deficit legacy does involve tough choices. But Liberal Democrats can be proud that, despite the economic restraints, we are taking radical action to improve quality and deliver better health and care.
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"Corporations have neither bodies to be punished, nor souls to be condemned, they therefore do as they like"
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16 Comments
As someone who has worked in social care – dealing with policy and training issues – for the last 7 years I know there is an urgent need to reform the system.
Unfortuantely the Labour Government prevaricated and used every trick in the book to try to avoid having to tackle the subject – at one point they even had a national consultaion on what should go in a consultation document!
The principle issue is demographics – thanks to health and lifesyle innovations people are living longer which will make the prevelance of degenerative conditions associated with ageing higher and there will be an increased need for social care provision.
However the need goes beyond the ‘regular’ elderly.
People with Learning Disabilites are living longer to and there is a greater tendency in those with Learning Disabilities for develop age related conditions. Unfortunately one of the prinicple means of dealing with this is simply placing people with learning disabilities in care facilities principally designed for elderly care – staffed by people without sufficient lnowledge in Learning Disabilities.
NOW is the time to tackle social care and I look forward to the Paper due to be published this month.
I’m sorry Paul, but it simply isn’t true. “Putting People First”, the initiative which focuses on reablement and brought in personal budgets, was introduced under the last government. As for mental health, that continues to be grossly underfunded, with the standard of care about the worst in the EU.
How does handing control of £80bn of the NHS Commissioning budget to GPs fit with enhancing mental health provision? Much of mental health provision is specialist and/or accessed by tertiary referral. GPs openly admit that they have a knowledge gap in these areas.
As someone mentioned to me the other day, there is a strange contradiction between the views that GPs cannot be trusted to conduct Incapacity Benefit medicals appropriately, so they are handed to the private sector (to do inappropriately!), but they can be trusted with 80bn quid!
Actually, Labour’s record on the NHS was very good. Waiting lists were horrendous when they came into power. I criticise and praise all governments, regardless of the party. You do yourself no favours in this piece.
“Meanwhile the other £1billion will go direct to local councils to help deal with the demographic and cost pressures, which impact on healthcare.”
When local councils are to have their budgets slashed by £billions, a small allowance of £1 billion across all the local councils is not going to make much difference.
Paul – who will look after public health once PCTs are abolished? Who will tell doctors what drugs are value for money once NICE is stopped from doing this? Why have you signed up to a health policy that wasn’t in the coalition agreement? Why do you suddenly support the total lack of democracy in healthcare (not social care and commissioning, but GP-level healthcare)? Why are you backing Andrew Lansley, widely regarded not only as an incompetent but an ideologue who wants to hollow out the public service ethos of the NHS? Why do you support the removal of traffic light labelling on food? Why do you support a man who doesn’t think that the state has any role in telling us about healthy eating and living? Why are you working with Tory Ministers who won’t visit anywhere outside of the Home Counties and have displayed reprehensible bigotry and ignorance about ethnic minorities and sexual health? In other words, what on earth are you still doing there????
Paul Burstow: What has happened to the week’s break Nick Clegg promised to give to the “hidden army of heroes” * who save “the rest of us taxpayers £87billion a year because of all the help they are giving to people who are very vulnerable – feeding, washing, dressing and so on.” *
He said it could be in place by the summer. The summer has been and gone.
[*Quotes from Nick Clegg election campaign speeches.]
@ paul Propergnda such as this article is cheap. You talk of what you are doing for the mentally ill …..totally forgetting that you are being supportive of taking their benafits away . Your remit has been one of the most disapointing of the coalition . If you really were a privatisation neo con you could at least have told us .
“With very little fanfare, we have demonstrated our commitment to tackling the prejudices and problems associated with mental health. Unlike Labour, we will put mental health on an equal footing with physical health. That is why we have committed £70million this year to give more people the opportunity to access talking therapies”
£70 Million will do nothing to improve our inadequate, under-funded mental health care.
Labour failed miserable in this area, and the coalition are destined to do even worse.
I know of a personal case, of someone who has suffered from severe depression and Anxiety on and off for the Last 15 years. He has attempted suicide on at least 8 different occasions that I know of, where he has been hospitalised for a couple of day’s and then released.
The last lot of cognitive behaviour therapy provided by the NHS only lasted 20 (1hr) sessions. His therapist who said in her opinion, he was not well enough to stop therapy, unfortunately her hands where tied though and she could not give him any more sessions, due to lack of funding in the department and the high demand for the service.
I ended up going to the doctors with him some weeks later, as I saw him deteriorating and I voiced my concerns to his G.P
His G.P was very sympathetic, but said there was nothing he could do either, In short he said “unless he was to make another attempt on his life, or was out in a public place and made threats to his own life, then he would not able to make another referral for further therapy.
His G.P did increase his medication though, so he know takes, antidepressants, Sleeping Tablets and now Tranquillizers.
I couldn’t believe what I had heard, I don’t blame his GP, as I could see the position that he was in.
My friend is now in Private therapy, that he is funding out of his own Benefits, and this does not come cheap.
And what is happening to him now you wonder, He just had his DLA removed, even though he had supporting evidence from his GP and therapists, about the severity of his Depression, he is now faced with the ordeal of a Tribunal.
Mental healthcare sucks in this country, and our benefits system which is supposed to help support people like this, is now coming under threat as well.
There are very good reasons why mental health care charities have been very concerned and very vocal lately, about the cuts.
It’s unfortunate people are choosing to ignore them
These reforms do nothing to address the ongoing problem of funding long term care for older people as life expectancy continues to increase. As RichardSM points out, £2b is nothing when council budgets are being slashed and frozen across the country. And what about care for the baby boomers who are currently relatively healthy and approaching retirement or retired, but in 15, 20, 25 years time many will require care everyday. What measures are being put in place now to plan for that eventuality? Lord Sutherland’s 1999 report proposed reforms to address this http://www.archive.official-documents.co.uk/document/cm41/4192/4192.htm but thirteen years later there is still no fixed system in place about how social care costs will be met.
With regard to the other points Paul Burstow makes, £40m for hospices is an insult. I’ll admit an interest as I volunteer for a hospice. This hospice does absolutely fantastic work and serves the needs of patients and their families extremely well, yet has to fundraise £5m a year to keep going as it only receives a third of its funding from the government/NHS. This is not an isolated case and on average hospices throughout England only receive about a third of their funding from the NHS. Shockingly children’s hospices receive far less than this. Consequently we fail vulnerable, dying patients who die in hospital, in pain and without their dignity rather than in their homes or hospices which numerous surveys have shown is what people would prefer.
I agree with Matt that £70m for mental health services is paltry, particularly when you consider that due to the cut in prison places, many prisoners/convicts with mental health problems will now be referred to the NHS instead. It is commendable that those with mental health problems will no longer be in prisons where they cannot access the help and support they need, however this will place increased pressure on already stretched mental health services and far more than £70m will be needed to help support and rehabilitate these people as well as the millions of other people who experience mental health problems.
In short, the poor, the sick, the disabled and mentally disabled were not responsible for the credit crunch, the bank bailout or the deficit. But they are nevertheless being punished. Ever time I hear the word ‘fair’, especially from the mouths of tories, it turns my stomach.
@ mike – it’s horrible, isn’t it? but the fact of the matter is that the poor and the mentally disabled are not the wealth creators or high earners who will pay our way out of this debt (the disbaled may or may not be). You will have to face up to the unpleasant fact of life that if we punish the banks and bankers with taxes that are overly punitive, then we will actually reduce our overall tax take by driving them away, or into tax avoidance schemes, and thus impede our ability to use tax revenue to help those sick, poor and disabled in the future. Thats’ not to say that i think we should give in to banks’ constant threats about this, nor that i believe they are sufficiently well-taxed at the moment, but everytime i hear about the poor being ‘punished’ i have to ask the person who says it what their alternative is.
@mike cobley
“In short, the poor, the sick, the disabled and mentally disabled were not responsible for the credit crunch, the bank bailout or the deficit. But they are nevertheless being punished.”
I completely agree. The focus is now on the long-term unemployed, as if they are to blame for the financial crisis. People seem to have short memories. This problem was caused by the banks and they are continuing in the same manner.
Sorry but where does it say that the disabled will have their benefits taken away?
What exactly is wrong with a test to see what work *can* be done by those on long term disability benefit?
Are you suggesting we take everyone’s word for it and be done with it?
Would you also take everyone’s word in Rochdale that 12% of the entire working population are genuinely needed to be on incapacity benefit?
The problem with those on the left is they become tribal as soon as someone questions why there are so many people on long term benefits. They actually support unemployment as a lifestyle choice, and close their ears when someone questions it.
I personally know of 3 people who are currently playing the system, and yes I have claimed DLA before for OCD and anxiety disorders, and I am more than happy to be tested so that those who give the genuinely disabled people a bad name are rooted out.
jezz the problem is that those who are doing the testing think that people who are really sick can work. I have personal knowledge of a young woman who is dying of cancer who was rated ok to work and also not eligable for dla. By the time this young woman had tried to get help she became too sick to fight. This is being replicated across the country.
So what’s the answer then? That we should take people’s word for it if they wish to claim DLA, or to improve the testing?
Why does it haev to be such a black and white issue?
Why is it that in the trial location of Burnley 75% of people didnt bother even going through the testing process and abandoned their application when they knew they would be tested?
Does that not strike you as slightly strange?