“The substantive issues about the way older people were discharged from hospital last year are not about legal processes at all – they are about whether appropriate measures were taken to protect vulnerable older peoples’ lives in the face of the unfolding pandemic.”
Care homes
“If we are to design a NCS worthy of the name, it is essential that the full truth about that disaster is made public, including the role of central government, private sector providers and the relationship between the two. The revelations of the last two weeks represent some tentative steps in the right direction.”
Nick Kempe: Would the Scottish Government’s proposals for a National Care Service have averted the death toll in our care homes?
“A socialisation of care is required, one that trains and pays people to care. This requires a cultural shift – which exalts care rather than treating it as something that should go unseen, unheard and unremunerated.”
David Jamieson: Dignity in life and solidarity in loss, but not just for Prince Philip
“Care homes are asked to ‘undertake individual risk assessments to assess the rights and needs of individual residents’. The whole point of human rights surely is that no-one should be able to ‘assess’ anyone as not having them?”
Nick Kempe: The politics of care and care home visiting
“People in Scotland deserve far better, but we will not get that so long as those responsible for the current system are responsible for redesigning it.”
Nick Kempe: The Feeley review on Adult Social Care offers only more of the same
“The biggest argument for nationalising the care home industry now is what will happen if the Scottish Government doesn’t intervene and continues to waste resources on trying to make the current market system work.”
Nick Kempe: The case for nationalising Scotland’s care homes
“Scottish Ministers could usefully commission further rapid reports on aspects of what is going wrong from people prepared to think critically. The users of services, their families and the staff who work in care deserve no less.”
Nick Kempe: A better plan for tackling Covid in care homes requires asking the right questions
The conclusions of a much-awaited report into discharges of patients from hospitals to care homes should be treated with care. It shows that the risk of a care home outbreak is more clearly related to the size of the care home (larger more likely to have an outbreak) than by the extent of hospital discharge into a […]
Take care with the hospital discharges to care homes report
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. […]
Nick Kempe: Towards a genuine National Care Service?
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 […]