Social Care

Holly Lynch Excerpts

Wednesday 16th November 2016 Commons Chamber

[Holly Lynch (Halifax) (Lab)]

I really welcome the opportunity to have this debate today, and we have heard some excellent speeches. I want to pay particular tribute to my right hon. Friend the Member for Leigh (Andy Burnham), who made a powerful speech. I pay tribute to the work he has done, and to his passion and commitment to bringing health and social care together. He deserves credit for that and I wish him all the best as he takes that fight beyond this place. I think he will do great things with it.

My local authority, Calderdale Council, has already written to the Chancellor and the Secretary of State for Health to outline its concerns about the crippling underfunding of social care. Following a motion passed at full council, council leader Tim Swift has called on the Government to bring forward the better care fund, to develop a workforce strategy and to accelerate progress towards establishing a single pooled budget for health and social care in all areas by 2020. The King’s Fund report has recently acknowledged that local authorities are having to make incredibly difficult decisions about where to make service reductions, with no room to make further savings. The report goes on to state that without further funding, most councils will soon be unable to meet even their basic statutory duties.

At a time when we are having yet another rethink about how we organise and structure NHS services with the sustainability and transformation plans, the NHS Confederation, which brings together all the different organisations that make up the NHS, has said in its representation to the Treasury that if the Government continue to fail to provide the right conditions to transform the service into one that is sustainable for the future, a tough challenge will become an impossible one. It cites the decisions to cut spending on public health through the local authority grant and to delay much needed social care funding until later in the Parliament as examples, saying that while there is no doubt that these decisions have made short-term savings for the Treasury, there are strong indications that this will come at the expense of significant long-term costs and could hinder the transformation that we all want to see. Rob Webster, the chief executive officer of South West Yorkshire Partnership NHS Foundation Trust and the lead on the West Yorkshire and Harrogate sustainability and transformation plan, made this clear when he said:

“We must invest in social care and public health. Our STP shows quite clearly that modern health and care services focus on the whole person—and that means their mental, physical and social care needs. If we do not invest in social care and prevention, we may not have a sustainable NHS at all.”

I recently spent time with the Yorkshire Ambulance Service in my constituency, and I was particularly interested in how the paramedics would be affected by the proposed downgrade of services at Huddersfield royal infirmary. It was clear to me just how many ambulance call-outs, and consequent hospital stays, could have been avoided if appropriate mental health provision and social care had been in place. We visited an older gentleman who had initially simply become dehydrated. He had grown increasingly confused and, in his confusion, he had stopped taking his medication. His neighbours called an ambulance when they realised that he had become quite unwell as a result. According to the paramedics, that was not unusual and they would expect to see a number of similar calls over the course of a 12-hour shift. He was a proud man and was clearly distressed to think he had caused a fuss. That ambulance call-out and hospital stay could have been avoided had social care been in place, empowering him to live well in his own home and saving the NHS the cost of more serious interventions later on. That experience reinforces the case made by the NHS Confederation to the Government that without the appropriately funded delivery of mental health support and social care services, attempts to transform the NHS into a more sustainable model are doomed to fail.

Another issue that I want to touch on is respite care. My constituent, Mrs Burrows, came to see me in tears last week. Her elderly mother has Alzheimer’s and a variety of related health complications. Following an assessment, Mrs Burrows was allocated eight weeks of respite care a year for her mum. Despite this allocation, she has to work with social services to find an appropriate establishment that is able to care for her mother. She also has to make the arrangements, but she struggles to find a place for her mother in residential care because temporary beds are just not available. Part of the problem is that she is able to book respite care only a week in advance, which means that she cannot plan ahead. She finds it difficult to book holidays or confirm her attendance at family events such as weddings. Mrs Burrows was particularly distressed because her daughter required urgent medical treatment and she desperately needed to find respite care for her mother so that she could look after her grandchildren while her daughter had the treatment. However, there were just no beds available.

I want to take this opportunity to commend the Alzheimer’s Society for the work it has done with its Dementia Friends programme, which, as of 1 pm today, has trained 1,752,419 friends, all of whom now have an enhanced awareness of what it takes to support someone to live well with dementia. It is a massive achievement, and I am proud to be one of those dementia friends. Worryingly, however, research undertaken by the Alzheimer’s Society found that 38% of homecare workers do not receive any dementia training and that 71% do not receive dementia training that is accredited—despite the commitments made in the Prime Minister’s challenge on dementia. Some 850,000 people are living with dementia in the UK and an estimated 400,000 of those are in receipt of some form of home care. The scale of the challenge is huge, but if we do not start working on finding the answers to both the availability and the quality of social care now, imagine the crisis we will be facing in five, 10 or 20 years’ time.

Without an injection of investment into social care, we will have no chance of balancing the demands on the NHS. Good, proactive social care would require investment but it is not just the right thing to do; it would ultimately be cost-effective and prevent more costly and avoidable interventions later on.