“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.”
Care homes
“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 […]
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 […]