NEWS RELEASE FROM THE
REGISTERED NURSING HOME ASSOCIATION
Issued 21st March 2005
GOVERNMENT’S SOCIAL CARE GREEN PAPER
CONDEMNED AS ‘WOOLLY’ AND ‘ONE SIDED’
More questions are asked than answered by the Government’s Green Paper on social care, Independence, Well-Being and Choice (published today), according to the Registered Nursing Home Association (RNHA), which expressed disappointment at the ‘woolliness’ of large parts of the document, as well as its ‘one sided’ presumptions about what services people want.
The Green Paper lacks the rigorous intellectual analysis and factual support which should be associated with supposedly ‘heavyweight’ policy pronouncements of this kind, the RNHA believes.
With the Government’s own estimates projecting a rapid rise in the numbers of very elderly people over the next thirty to fifty years, the RNHA said it failed to see how proposed improvements in some services could be achieved within existing levels of resources without many people being denied the care they preferred.
Said RNHA chief executive officer, Frank Ursell: “The Government’s idea of choice appears to be that it is OK to choose if you opt for the things that the Government thinks are best for you. For example, you will be able to exercise a right to request not to go into a residential care home or nursing home. But, apparently, you will not in this brave new world have a specific right to request to go into a nursing home.
Essentially, it is one way traffic in the direction of the ideologically correct way of doing things from the Government’s pre-determined perspective.”
He added: “The Green Paper under-estimates and therefore under-values the importance of nursing home care for very poorly patients with complex, multiple health needs. There should not be an underlying assumption that domiciliary care is best for all individuals in all circumstances. Many people enjoy a much better quality of life from the more intensive professional and social contact available to them in a care home.”
Responding to proposals to increase the scope of ‘direct payments’ for care, including an ability to spend taxpayers’ money on holidays, Mr Ursell questioned the wisdom of raiding a fixed social care budget for this purpose if it risked denying residential nursing care to those who really needed it.
“I also wonder whether the Government’s attachment to direct payments stretches to allowing individuals to use the money for nursing home care,” he asked.
END
For further information and comment, please contact: Frank Ursell, Chief Executive Officer, RNHA (Tel: 0121-454 2511 or 07785 227000)
|
