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NEWS RELEASE FROM THE
REGISTERED NURSING HOME ASSOCIATION
Issued 3rd December 2002
GOVERNMENT’S ‘CRAZY LOGIC’ UNDER FIRE
FOR NHS TO SOCIAL SERVICES MONEY TRANSFER
The Government has come under fire for its decision to take £100 a million a year away from the NHS and give it to local authority social services departments in case they are ‘fined’ for failing to provide community care for patients waiting to be discharged from hospital.
The Registered Nursing Home Association said today that the funding switch represented ‘a crazy kind of logic’ which would give social services little or no incentive to improve and accelerate their discharge planning processes.
“Delayed discharges due to poor working practices in social services are one of the scandals of the care system,” said RNHA chief executive officer Frank Ursell. “Are cash-strapped social services departments really going to use the £100 million to create alternatives to hospital? Past experience suggests that the money will disappear down a black hole and that very little of it will find its way into the care of older people.”
He added: “But even if we make the extremely optimistic assumption that every single penny will be used to pay for nursing care in the community, the amount is only about one tenth of the figure which, according to independent analysts, is needed to make up the difference between what care providers are currently receiving in fees from social services departments and what the care actually costs. Yet again, it is an example of muddled thinking by the Government. It threatens to make little or no impact on the underlying problem of patients languishing on hospital wards when they should have been transferred into more appropriate facilities in the community.”
END
For further information and comment please contact:
Frank Ursell, Chief Executive Officer, Registered Nursing Home Association
Tel: 0121-454 2511 or 07785 227000 mobile
Note to editors:
1. Earlier this year the Joseph Rowntree Foundation published a report entitled Calculating a Fair Price for Care - a Toolkit for Residential and Nursing Care Costs) which, using research data from the Laing & Buisson organisation, calculated that £1 billion would be needed in order to plug the current financial shortfall between the fees paid to the independent long-term care sector by social services departments and the fees they would need to balance their books.
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