(Picture at the new North Devon District Hospital Jubilee Ward prior to its opening to help tackle elective surgery backlogs)
Having just read another complaint from a local resident about a long wait at our much loved North Devon District Hospital, I felt compelled to put pen to paper, so to speak, about a topic we have heard so little about during this leadership election – social care.
Here in North Devon length of stay at the hospital has increased, despite the best efforts of the local Council and incredible work of the hospital staff. In general, North Devon District Hospital have had a good record on wait times and organising social care packages. We may be small, but we are innovative and adaptable. Innovation and adaptability is what we need in the NHS and there are many hospital trusts that should take a look at how we do things here. However, we simply do, not have enough social care workers here for the level of demand on the service.
We have an ageing population in the south west, our demographics are where the rest of the country will be in ten years time. Having visited a social care provider this week as well, it is clear the issue is a lack of staff, despite increases in pay and conditions, recruitment is the challenge. Reforms, innovations and investment are happening, but all of this may come to nothing without the required workforce. As the care charity detailed to me, if they had more staff they could provide more respite care and help more people, who no longer need the high cost, high dependence hospital bed, into a more suitable setting.
The delay in discharge is also detrimental to the long term health outcomes for the patients, not to mention the issues it is having at the admission end. We are seeing A&E delays now ever increasing, not because of efficiency issues, nothing like it, simply a lack of beds, as people well enough to go home, cannot because of the lack of a suitable care package being available.
How anyone thinks that we can reverse the 1.25% National Insurance rise and still deliver the required increase in volume of social care I have no idea. I fully accept there may be some efficiency savings in a large organisation such as the NHS – but its not efficiency that is the issue in social care – the system, particularly in parts of the country like here with an elderly population, simply is not working how it needs to.
When you overlay the challenges of recruitment with the lengths of journey required in a remote rural location to deliver social care, with the massive increase in fuel prices, the costs of the social care service are astronomical. Social care providers simply do not have the capital available to switch fleets to electric ones, even if we had an adequate charging network, investment is needed both financial and time, to really tackle the issues around social care.
With an ageing population, and declining workforce, we need to find ways to effectively enable international workers to help. Agency workers are coming from across the UK to deliver care here, which in itself is raising the cost of care even further. Our County Council budget is more than squealing under these pressures, yet no one seems willing to talk about it.
The social care sector can recruit internationally, but here in North Devon we also have an extreme housing crisis with virtually no affordable accommodation. I continue to work at Westminster and with the local council to find solutions, but none will be instant. I urge the local council to see if some of the planning restrictions on holiday lets can be lifted this winter (they can only be let for 10 months a year) to make these available to social care workers over the winter.
As a community we have found accommodation for a growing number of Ukrainian refugees who are very warmly welcome here, and I hope as a community we can start talking about the issues of social care, and similarly seek some creative, localised solutions. In the same way, I hope the party membership recognises that tax cutting may sound great, but it is our elderly and sick relatives that need the social care, and are waiting in hospitals, for discharge, and admission, because of its lack of availability.
Rishi Sunak has at least retained the £5.4 billion commitment to tackle social care and deliver what we have for far too long talked about behind the scenes, but needs to be discussed more widely. I dearly hope whoever is our next Prime Minister they will rapidly start work on tackling social care, as so many of the issues our healthcare system is grappling with are related to social care, not the NHS in isolation.
To date only one candidate has shown any interest in looking after our elderly population. For me politics is about people, particularly the most vulnerable in our society, and I hope the party membership will show their compassion when casting their leadership vote.
