A Higher Demand for Adult Social Care?
In the modern world, the use of adult social care has become a much more commonly discussed activity. Once seen as stigmatic for an adult, today social care is supported by the majority. However, while the societal view of adult social care is thankfully changing, the challenges of delivering care is also adjusting.
Delivering social care today is becoming much harder to achieve and deliver. Care workers are under-resourced and over-stretched with excessive demand. For that reason, it’s hard for those who need care to get the treatment they need. Indeed with care rising all the time, and the numbers of people involved in the care industry, too, there’s a higher demand than ever before.
According to the Care Quality Commission (CQC) The State of Health Care and Adult Social Care in England report, the challenges are stark. According to their sources, the number of people aged 85 or over in England is set to more than double within two decades. Higher living quality means that we are in a position whereby more people will need care eventually. In the past, many people did not live to the age where they needed.
With more people living beyond 80 now, though, there’s an obvious demand for care. More than a third of people aged over 85 will have problems carrying out more than five daily tasks without assistance. If more people are in need of care, then it’s only sensible that we’ll need more care for them in the long-run, right?
It’s become a common part of the care program. Not only that, but it’s important that we take more to understand the need for more carers. Carers UK recently released their State of Caring annual release. The claim that close to three-quarters (73%) of carers suffer from mental health deterioration is alarming.
What Can Be Done to Improve Adult Social Care?
A whopping 2% reduction of nursing home beds from 2015-17 placed a larger burden on carers. While some areas have seen increases, some are down by as much as one fifth of the bedding that they need in the first place.
This naturally has many knock-on effects, such as an inability to care for adults. Funding care form local authorities is down, too, and many groups have de-registered from providing care. Thanks to the £2bn invested into adult social care in mid-2017, there is a small level of respite for the carers presently involved.
With the National Health Service under increasingly more pressure, there’s no catch-all answer. Funding tranches are being combatted by cuts and other costs across councils and local wards. With increases barely covering the cost requirements and cuts leading to a vicious-cycle of cuts and short-term coverage, the rising demand for adult social care is hard to meet.
There is a rising demand, but with financial limitations becoming clearer and clearer, meeting demand is becoming a unique challenge. With no clear answer in sight, 2018 looks to continue along the same lines as before; doing the best we can with the resources we have access to.
