NEWS RELEASE FROM THE
REGISTERED NURSING HOME ASSOCIATION
Issued 3rd March 2004
OFT DECISION NOT TO INVESTIGATE LOCAL AUTHORITY CARE PAYMENTS IS A ‘COP OUT’, SAY NURSING HOME REPRESENTATIVES
The ultimate ‘cop out’ is how one major national body has reacted today to the decision by the Office of Fair Trading not to investigate the impact of uneconomically low fees paid by social services departments for the care provided by nursing homes to publicly funded patients.
The Registered Nursing Home Association (RNHA), which represents over 1,200 nursing homes in England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland, expressed bitter disappointment at the news, saying it would enable the main funding bodies for nursing home care to get off ‘scot free’.
Nursing home leaders feel the OFT is turning a convenient blind eye to the effect which local authorities’ decisions have on the market.
With around 60 per cent of patients having their care fees paid by social services, the fact that the figures paid by social services are often below the actual costs incurred by the providers is the biggest single element in any equation about prices, claims the RNHA. To hold an investigation without looking at this key factor undermines the validity of the whole exercise, it says.
RNHA chief executive officer Frank Ursell commented: “Local authorities are the major purchasers of nursing home care. If they refuse to pay an economic rate and insist on keeping the price of care down to a level where care providers make a trading loss, this is absolutely fundamental to the price which nursing homes have to charge patients who are funding their own care. It is staggering that the OFT either cannot see or does not want to see this.”
He added: “The OFT intends to look at the way nursing homes structure their fees and communicate with patients and their relatives about them. We have no objection in principle to such an inquiry. But we do object to being under the microscope when the organisations which have by far the biggest influence on our pricing are themselves being totally ignored. How can the OFT expect to be viewed as an independent and impartial organisation when it is so manifestly failing to act even-handedly?”
The RNHA says it will write formally to the OFT to lodge a complaint about its failure to take a balanced approach and to request a rethink about the inquiry’s terms of reference.
Said Mr Ursell: “The credibility of inquiries by agencies such as the OFT is at stake here. I doubt whether its conclusions can or will be taken seriously if they are based on such a one-sided analysis of the issues involved.”
END
For further information and comment please contact:
Frank Ursell, chief executive officer, RNHA (Tel: 0121-454 2511 or 07785 227000 mobile)
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