Scottish Care has today launched a new report, entitled ‘Bringing Home Care’, at the Care at Home & Housing Support Conference in Glasgow.
The report focuses on home care’s role in the preventative care agenda, how the sector has developed in recent years (including the impact of Free Personal Care), and a sets out a vision for the future of home care services.
The report seeks to demonstrate that for the care at home and housing support sector to become a sustainable, high quality form of care provision which is self-evidentially an intrinsic part of the whole, we must do a lot more to focus upon and develop some of the major contributory elements of its work.
The following areas of home care delivery are explored in the report, in relation to how they have changed over time to the present day, and what the future focus of care at home provision is likely to be:
- The role of care at home workers and services
- The development and sustainability of care at home services
- Partnerships, relationships and status
- The value placed on home care provision, and the people they support.
The report locates the tracking of these changes in a context of:
- Highlighting the loss of relational elements of the care offer and the impact this has had;
- Describing the increase in eligibility criteria and the consequential decline in overall use of care at home services;
- Focusing on the potential of the ‘preventative role’ of homecare, and
- Relating this to the ADL LifeCurve™ work of Professor Peter Gore from Newcastle University.
In doing so, it hopes to show that the future of care at home services must be developed and commissioned in a way that prioritises time-flexible, relationship-based, preventative approaches to care delivery.
