Absolutely agree with Cris and most of the other comments here. CHC is like a bad joke. The process has way too many hoops to jump through and technicalities of conditions and intervention required that make it too easy for health to say not eligible.

The health and social care split overall is crazy in my area, I work in Mental Health and our social work office is literally 100 yards away from the NHS Mental Health team yet in terms of ease of communication and co-working we might as well be in different countries!

That is so true. I spent a few years in a CCG within joint commissioning and as a social worker I was always objective, unlike some of my ‘health’ colleagues who seemed to want to shaft neighbouring Local Authorities showing no regard for service-users and their families. I was horrified by the pressure imposed on us to reduce the CHC budget. I had to leave for my own sanity and no longer work in this area, but it sounds like matters are worse than ever.

But, in those days most care in the home was done by families as the degrees of disabilities and other aspects were not as pronounced as they are now. People are currently living longer be they be disabled or not but the gap between some disability mortality is still a very large gap between persons assessed to have no disabilities.

Over the years the split between health and social care has created much duplication and confusion which would never have occurred if there had been no split between health and social care.

But lack of funding in both health and social is a forever problem and much more so with regards to social care, just look at the pay rate for social care workers for one. They are classed as unskilled when to do care as it should be done they have to be very skilled, in how to use hoists both portable and tracking, feeding in many different requirements and so much more.

Yes, there are staff shortages in both health and social care, but so much more so in social care, even to persons coming from outwith the UK. The visa allocations are also problems and when granted the period length is too short.

To reduce the shortages in social care staffing the pay rates have to be considerably increased to far more than both the National and Real Living Wages.

Governments are not listening, but do they ever, but, I they don’t very soon I can see that social care will fail to exist and then the NHS will not be far behind. However, that could be the real intention of the government and that would be the end of any care free at the point of delivery and it could then get even worse than in the USA.

Now that is unthinkable, but so is the current situation so we have to get a listening government some how.

the Health and Well-being Board Scrutiny Boards within each Council the ICB area covers have this function ~ the inception of the ICB’s wholly dependent on agreements made with the out-going CCG’s for no substantive changes in the delivery plans at Local Authority level.

Planitr, eh!

@Alec. Spot on. And now we’re in the crisis, created by the govt.

It’s not just about CHC. A great deal of what is now described as ‘social care’ (which nobody had heard of 30 years ago) was once done by the NHS via the District Nurse or similar

Hi Tina,

As a care provider of many years I have recently written to ICB’s and to Adult Social Work teams. There is no acknowledgement of the letters, just zilch. I know in talking to other providers they are experiencing the same thing. They have availability which is not being taken up. Very sad. Angela