“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”
Social Care
“Social work should have been at the forefront of defending the rights of those who have needed care during the Covid crisis, from asylum seekers to older people in care homes denied contact with their families.”
Nick Kempe: The crisis of leadership in the social care system
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
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
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
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 […]
Social care: “From a crisis to a catastrophe”
One thing I’ve learnt from this crisis is that you have to be careful to avoid being seduced by what appears to be a consensus of the need for systemic change. In the most dramatic moments of the pandemic, you couldn’t pay for someone to criticise key workers. They were lauded by every bad boss, […]