Scottish Care has issued the following Media Statement following recent negotiations with COSLA and the Integrated Joint Boards.
Care home providers have been forced to accept a marginal uplift of 2.8 % to the funding of care home placements made by Local Authorities.
The 2.8% offer from COSLA includes delivering the new Scottish Living Wage of £8.45 to adult social care workers in care homes from May 1st 2017, which means in effect, providers have been presented with a net 1% uplift in funding for care homes at a time when they are faced with significant cost pressures which have increased by approximately 8.5%.
Providers were faced with an immensely hard and challenging decision, either to accept this unreasonable offer or abandon the National Care Home Contract entirely, therefore potentially jeopardising the stability of the care they provide for older people. An overwhelming majority of those who voted to accept did so under considerable protest, feeling caught between a rock and a hard place. However, they felt that the preservation of the National Care Home Contract was their main priority in order that the people they support were best protected against further cuts to the funding of their care.
Dr Donald Macaskill, CEO of Scottish Care who negotiate the Contract on behalf of care home providers, said:
“We believe that this level of funding endangers not only the survival of the National Care Home Contract but risks huge instability within the whole Health and Social Care environment in Scotland.
“Many providers have expressed not only their disappointment with this funding but their sense of dismay and hurt. As they see it, the contribution of the care home sector to wider health and social care provision, is clearly viewed with such low esteem that the viability concerns for the sector have been so easily dismissed.
“We are profoundly concerned about the survival of some of our care homes and will want to work vigorously with COSLA and Integrated Joint Boards to ensure that quality provision is not lost to the sector as a result of accepting this offer. We are immensely disappointed in the level of this uplift and what we consider to be the grossly inadequate funding of social care by Scottish Government.
“COSLA have indicated that the limited finances available mean they are unable to further improve this funding package. Therefore we can only conclude that it is the failure of Scottish Government to adequately fund the settlement that risks a significantly detrimental impact on provision for older people in Scotland.
“The unwillingness to invest directly into the care home is resonant of a failure to grasp the significance of the issue and a wholehearted lack of valuing of the sector and thus older people’s care and support.
“This is not only about money. It is about the rights, dignity and choice of older people. Scottish Care and its members believe this deal is completely unacceptable, and will work hard to ensure that older people’s human rights and care services cannot be jeopardised in this way again.”
