Nick Kempe, former head of service for Elderly People in Glasgow, examines what we know so far about the review of adult social care, and if it’s really thinking radically enough about the scale of changes required to address the deep structural problems in the sector which have been so evident during the covid-19 crisis. […]
Care homes
The fight-back has started. David Bell, Professor of Economics at the University of Stirling, has said the idea of a National Care Service is a “distraction”. He said we should instead be focusing on how to increase funding to the sector, and what a fair funding mechanism would look like. Donald MacAskill, CEO of Scottish […]
The debate about the future of social care is heating up
“Regulation of the care home market is very weak, with almost no attention is given to issues like sector consolidation, let alone questions about whether the owner of a care home is prepared to put care before profit.”
Nick Kempe: Why we should be concerned that Real Estate Investment Trusts are expanding into the care home market
The announcement of NHS Highland buying out HC-One’s Home Farm care home in Skye has taken away the focus in much of the media from the Care Inspectorate’s official inspection report at Home Farm from 18 May, which has only just been published by the care regulator now. You can access it here. It makes absolutely […]
The Home Farm buy-out leaves a sour taste
“Generally, if you wish to be progressive, then you don’t give all your tight public finances to corporations. The words ‘public’ and ‘ownership’ do not appear in the same sentence in this report. There is little which will be substantially different from what I expect from the UK Government in the same poicy fields – and that is a worry.”
Programme for Government: who benefits as the government runs out of steam?
Imagine you are elderly, and you and your family are discussing whether to move into a care home. Maybe a Source Direct subscriber out there is in this situation. Naturally, you would be worried about covid-19. One of the questions you may have about a possible care home is: ‘How has it done so far […]
We need care homes transparency: whether commercial providers like it or not
Health Secretary Jeane Freeman has announced she will not be seeking re-election next year. Freeman joins Mike Russell, Aileen Campbell and Roseanna Cunningham in being the latest Minister to announce that she will be stepping down. “While I have a great deal of energy left and more I want to do, I think it is […]
Jeane Freeman to step down at Holyrood elections
“The health impacts of Covid-19 shouldn’t just be assessed in terms of those who have died, but also by looking at the lives of those who have survived.”
Nick Kempe: What’s happening with rehabilitation in care homes in Scotland?
While the media’s attention was focused on the answers of Permanent Secretary Leslie Evans in the first day of the Holyrood-Salmond inquiry yesterday, Health Secretary Jeanne Freeman came up with some pretty curious answers of her own in response to questioning about the care homes crisis in parliament on Tuesday. Asked about the Sunday Post’s […]
The Scottish Govt can’t wash its hands of hospital discharge to care homes
The latest Common Weal paper by leading care expert Nick Kempe, ‘Lessons Learned?’, examines data from the Care Inspectorate, the body responsible for monitoring social care standards in Scotland, about the state of play in care homes five months after the pandemic crisis began. Kempe’s paper is the first to compare the inspection grades to those […]