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



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 […]

Social care: “From a crisis to a catastrophe”


Common Weal today publishes a very important report on the Care Homes crisis written by Nick Kempe, former Head of Service for Older People in Glasgow. The report can be read here, and is worth taking the time to go through carefully. A full analysis will appear on Source later.  Here, I will only focus on one aspect […]

We need to talk about democratic accountability in public services


The more one finds out about Home Farm care home in Portree, Skye, the more clear it is that something fundamental is wrong, not just here, but in the way care homes are run in this country generally.  The Care Inspectorate have now submitted an application to cancel the care home’s registration, run by private […]

Home Farm, and why the failures in care homes run deep


When the inevitable inquiry takes place into what’s happened in care homes in Scotland during this crisis, there will undoubtedly be myriad reasons identified for why the necessary protections were not in place when they were needed. But as one Source Direct subscriber who has had experience of a family member in a care home […]

Nourishing the care economy


Analysis of new ONS data by John Hopkins University in the US suggests that the UK’s five-day average for Covid-19 deaths is higher than any other European country for this point in the pandemic curve. In other words, Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s “apparent success” has a very good case for being the worst response to […]

We can all count mortality


Covid-19 patients discharged from hospital to care homes will be tested as a matter of routine after all. Health Secretary Jeanne Freeman made the announcement yesterday, just 24 hours after First Minister Nicola Sturgeon had said that testing everyone discharged from hospital could create a “false positive” if the person is asymptomatic. Why it took […]

Care Homes: A Privatisation Story