Our position on social care
Social care can look and feel very different from the health care you receive from the NHS. Although it can include medical help, social care offers more practical support to enable people to live independently.
These services are usually provided in people's homes, in care homes or elsewhere in the community, like a supported living community, rather than at a medical service like a GP practice or hospital.
People have told us that the social care system can be complex, with assessment and funding processes and a lack of personalised information and support, meaning people often need help finding the right help.
Shining a light on the struggles surrounding social care
We worked with local Healthwatch in 2021 to understand people’s experiences of accessing social care and how their needs often go under-met. We polled 1,800 adults to see how aware they were of social care support and whether people accessing support were getting what they needed.
People who use social care told us about needing better information, clearer advice, fairer assessments, and more quality and personalised care. Many adults are also confused about who is responsible for providing social care services, where to turn for help and the processes for accessing support.
What we're calling for
- Councils must be given the resources and support to provide proactive information and advice services to their communities.
- We support calls for care home residents to have a legal right to care support workers and visitors (such as family and friends).
- We support calls for social care reform, increased investment in services, and a renewed focus on implementing previously announced reforms.
Our evidence
Our research shows that people sometimes need help understanding what social care is, who provides services, how care is paid for, what their rights are, and who they should turn to for help. People have told us they want access to trusted, independent local sources of information on social care.
What do people want from social care?
Published in September 2018, this briefing summarised our research findings to inform the forthcoming green paper. Our key findings from this work were:
- Many people don't know how care is funded and expect it will be free at the point of use.
- Most people have given '‘little thought'’ to their future care needs.
- People want to know if a care service is safe, whether it will meet their needs or the needs of their family members, and how much it will cost.
- Many people don't know where to go for information to help them plan care for their loved ones.
- People want a reliable and trustworthy source for advice on social care.
What's it like being a carer?
This report from October 2018 highlights that carers are unaware of their rights to assessments and find accessing reliable information and advice about local care services challenging. Many carers only start looking for help when their need becomes urgent, and they reach a ‘crisis’ point. Any delay in accessing support at this point has an adverse effect on their health and wellbeing.
How to solve a problem like social care?
To better understand what the public wants from social care funding reforms and how well any proposal might be received, we commissioned a poll of 2,000 adults in August 2019.
This research shows a clear level of support (42%) across all groups for general taxation to pay for social care, with mixed views across age groups for compulsory or optional insurance models.
Our research also suggests that councils are not currently making the most of their annual complaints reports as an opportunity to demonstrate how responsive they are to feedback. Current council-level complaints reporting has become less accessible to the public, with too much focus on numbers and not enough learning.
Why it's important to review the care of people with dementia.
In July 2019, we published research which looked at people with dementia’s experiences of accessing and using social care services. We found that only 45% of people with dementia were receiving annual care plan reviews, which are required as a minimum under the Care Act. In total, only eight per cent of the feedback we received was positive, with many struggling to access reliable information and advice in a dementia-friendly, jargon‑free way.
How will we work to improve social care?
In 2018, we set out that any proposals on reforms to social care must satisfy five key questions. These questions fed into the Expert Advisory Group for the development of the social care green paper:
- Are the reforms understandable?
- Will they help people who need care?
- Do they give people more choice?
- Are they fair?
- Will they support families as well?
During the pandemic, we wrote to the Government expressing concerns with blanket care home visiting restrictions and were happy to work with stakeholders to develop care home visiting guidance. More recently, we supported calls for legal visiting rights in all health and care settings.
We shared our insights on social care with the Government before they published their social care white paper. Our advice influenced their decision to announce an additional five million pounds in funding for local organisations to test new ways of providing personalised information and advice to the public about social care services.
Our evidence to Government also highlighted that some people are not getting social care support. However, as stated in the white paper, the size of this group remains unclear because there is no clear Government data to understand more about who accesses care, who doesn’t, and why.
To help decision-makers better understand this issue, we are working with local Healthwatch to map out why people don’t always get the support they need from the social care system and which needs go unmet.
We have committed to an organisation-wide campaign focused on social care for 2023/24 and are currently scoping out our approach.
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