“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.”
National Care Service
“The reality for many Scottish social workers is that they only become involved when the situations of the people they work with might be beyond help, their skills being largely spent trying to mop up when earlier involvement might have prevented escalation”
Colin Turbett: Feeley’s Missing Link, ‘The Promise’, and reforming social work in Scotland
“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
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 advantages of one National Care Service aligned with the NHS would be considerable… Instead of providers competing with the NHS for scarce staff, resources could be planned and deployed where most needed.”