We need to see social care as an investment not a cost
“Loneliness is one of the biggest reasons people end up in care homes,” an investor once told me. “If you’re lonely, you don’t eat, you become frail, you fall.” This man made his fortune from care homes — but, I discovered, looked after his ageing parents himself. With up to one in five hospital beds in England now occupied by elderly patients who have nowhere else to go, his remark is a reminder that we can’t ignore the human, if we want to fix “social care”.
As the NHS collapses, hiring and training more care workers is probably the quickest and cheapest way to release hospital beds and help doctors tackle the waiting list. It could also avoid a dreadful self-fulfilling prophecy: the longer someone stays immobile on a ward, the more their muscles will deteriorate, and the less likely they are ever to be able to live independently again.
A few years ago, while writing a book about the ageing world, I visited several countries that seemed to have grasped a simple fact. The longer we can keep people independent and connected, the better their quality of life will be and the lower the burden on the health service. In the Netherlands, nurses who treat frail people at home also have a remit to build networks of friends and neighbours. In Australia, older people coming out of hospital receive up to 12 weeks of support to get back on their feet, including physiotherapy, counselling and social activities. These services share a far more ambitious vision than simply managing decline — which our cash-strapped system slides into.
This story originally appeared on: Financial Times - Author:Camilla Cavendish
