Ending the Social Care Crisis: A New Road to Reform

This makes it harder for people to leave hospital with the right support and gets in the way of offering well-coordinated services to people who have a mixture of health and care needs.

the ‘Big Care Debate’ in 2009, deliberative events with the public organised by Ipsos Mori in 2018 and a Citizens Assembly exercise also in 2018

Northern and central European countries and some Far East countries also offer a relatively universal level of care provision, and a very high level of risk-pooling, but this is achieved through compulsory social insurance rather than general taxation.

These different funding streams encourage the NHS and councils to push the funding responsibility onto each other, with the person needing care and their family caught in the middle.

It was all process, not relationships or happiness.

In Nordic countries, long-term care is part of a state-run welfare system in which services are universally available, funded largely through general taxation and highly regulated.

intellectually contested, politically contentious and hard to deliver,

many struggling to find their way around a complex system (Henwood et al, 2020). It seems absurd that, instead of designing something easy for people to use, we have ended up with a system so complicated and bewildering that some places have created a new type of worker called a ‘care navigator’ to help people to use it. Getting into the system in

has gone beyond lip service by actively promoting investment in ‘upstream’ capacity such as community facilities, volunteering and social support networks.