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Putting Human Rights into the Commissioning Cycle: new briefing paper launched at Conference

At today’s Annual Care at Home & Housing Support Conference, National Director Karen Hedge launched a new briefing paper for the home care sector focused on the commissioning and procurement landscape.

Entitled, ‘Putting Human Rights into the Commissioning Cycle: How to articulate your gut instinct‘, the paper outlines what is currently underway and what needs to change around five areas of commissioning:

  • procurement
  • fair work
  • competition or collaboration
  • improvement
  • intelligence and data

The paper calls for the adoption of an approach based on human rights principles in order to ensure a dignified and sustainable approach to commissioning and care.

You can follow the conference on Twitter at #homecare19

Human Rights Commissioning May 19
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Scottish Care CEO Conference Address: A Care Twilight Zone

Today (Friday 17 May) sees Scottish Care’s 13th Annual Care at Home & Housing Support Conference, Exhibition and Awards take place at the Marriott Hotel, Argyle Street, Glasgow.

Over 200 day delegates are attending including care providers, local authority, NHS, Scottish Government and regulatory colleagues.   This event is the only one of its kind in Scotland specifically for the homecare sector.

The title of this year’s conference is ‘Redressing the balance: the potential of home care” and the event is kindly sponsored by Quality Compliance systems. 

We are indisputably at an extremely challenging period in the care at home and housing support sector, and CEO Dr Donald Macaskill recognised this in his Address to delegates this morning.

Launching a briefing paper outlining the challenges, entitled ‘A Care Twilight Zone’, Donald revisited the 12 areas set out at last year’s conference and considered what has changed and what more needs done.

You can read the briefing paper here.

Follow the Conference on Twitter at #homecare19

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Press release: care sector facing a ‘twilight zone’

Provider representatives of home care providers say insufficient progress has been made in ensuring care services are safe and sustainable for Scotland’s older citizens and as a result, the sector is facing imminent demise.

The message will be delivered at the National Care at Home & Housing Support Conference in Glasgow today (FRI MAY 17) by Dr Donald Macaskill, Chief Executive of Scottish Care, the representative body for the country’s independent social care services. The 250 delegate event, which is sponsored by Quality Compliance Systems, will include an address by Cabinet Secretary for Health & Sport Jeane Freeman.

Unveiling a briefing paper based on his Conference Address – ‘A Care Twilight Zone” – Dr Macaskill said:

“We believe the truth and robustness of our arguments for rebalancing care are clear and demonstrable.  We believe passionately that the potential of homecare to re-shape care and support in Scotland is undeniable.

 “But we seem to talk in places where no-one is listening; we look around us and see care organisations going to the wall with disturbing regularity; where a growing number of providers are saying they simply cannot afford to work with the public sector in Scotland because of the increasing desire to pay less for more and to drive down the costs of care. Faced with that landscape evidencing a general state of care economic and delivery decline and dilapidation across the country, in my estimation, we are undeniably in a care twilight zone.”

In his address, Dr Macaskill will highlight nine key areas where urgent work is required to stabilize the home care sector in Scotland:

  • The Scottish Living Wage
  • Time & task commissioning of care
  • Approaches to prevention
  • Access to Self-Directed Support for older people
  • Recruitment of staff
  • Qualifications and the older care workforce
  • Integration of health & social care
  • The use of technology
  • Funding of social care

This week Scottish Care has written to COSLA calling for an urgent roundtable including the Scottish Government and the care regulator to address the immediate challenges facing the care at home and housing support sector.

Dr Macaskill said:

“We believe we urgently need to get round the table to come up with some practical solutions or we will not be able to continue to deliver vital services in the months ahead.

“We believe that we have to have a serious debate about how we are to fund social care into our futures, and I wonder if the silence to date is not indicative of a political desire to hide heads in the sand the closer we come to elections?

“We remain deeply concerned that there is a lack of political energy beyond political party interest and ambition to gather around the table and properly explore how we will fund social care in the short and medium term.

“We have to stop talking about and start implementing the change. We have a sector which is on its knees and it is way beyond the point of putting out the begging bowl for the scraps of finance left over when other sectors and issues are funded.” 

 

BACKGROUND INFORMATION

Scottish Care is a membership organisation and the representative body for independent sector social care services in Scotland and speaks with a single unified voice for small, medium and large providers across the independent care sector. This covers private and voluntary sector care home, care at home and housing support services, and also includes those who use independent sector care services.

Independent and voluntary sector providers combined employ nearly 100,000 social care staff, with nearly 71,000 of these individuals working in Housing Support and Care at Home services.

Each night of the week, home care providers support nearly 50,000 individuals in their own homes, most with increasingly complex needs.

The social care sector plays an important part in the Scottish economy, providing employment for over 202,000 people and generating an annual turnover of several billion pounds.

 

You can follow the Conference on Twitter using the hashtag #homecare19

 

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Living and Dying Well with Frailty Collaborative – HIS seeking applications

Healthcare Improvement Scotland have announced the launch of the ihub’s new collaborative from the Living Well in the Communities Portfolio.

It is an opportunity for Health and Social Care Partnerships and GP Clusters to improve how people aged 65 and over are supported to live and die well with frailty in the community.

Please see below the information relating to this and how to apply, should you be interested.

20190429 Living and Dying Well with Frailty - Advert
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Holyrood Staffing Bill – update

Last week the Health and Care (Staffing) (Scotland) Bill was passed unanimously in Parliament. Scottish Care gave evidence in Parliament has been successfully lobbying on behalf of our members to ensure that the Bill in its final stage is fit for our sector.

National Director Karen Hedge said:

We are confident that the Guiding Principles of the Bill, set with the purpose of ensuring the delivery of safe and high-quality services and ensuring the best care outcomes for those who access care and support is supportive of the very ethos of the independent care sector.

 

Whilst the legislation in itself will not solve the very real recruitment and retention challenges that the sector is currently facing, it will indirectly contribute to national workforce planning.

 

Most significantly, under section 7A, this will be through the requirement of Scottish Ministers to annually issue Parliament with a report on how the duties imposed by the Bill are being enacted. This includes the duties on those who provide, plan and secure care services, creating an official record by which to measure the impact of the Bill on staffing levels.

 

Critically the report must include steps that Ministers have taken to ensure that “funding is available to any person who provides a care service in order to assist in the discharge of those duties”.

 

The Bill as a whole sets duties upon “any person who provides a care service” in that they must have regard to any guidance which Ministers decide to issue, and additionally, if it is decided to pursue the development of a set of Staffing tools for the sector.

 

The development of tools would be led by the Care Inspectorate but must involve the sector to ensure that they support provision rather than limit it. Any tools should consider both quantitative and qualitative information, to include professional judgement and as such compliments existing work which Scottish Care has been involved in with regards to a capability tool to support the National Care Home Contract. In addition, there is real opportunity if the staffing method were developed to support the recognition and value of interdisciplinary working.

 

Scottish Care will continue to represent our members in the development of any staffing method or tools and in the development of any guidance which Scottish Ministers may issue.

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Psychology of Dementia – NES event

NHS Education for Scotland (NES) is planning to relaunch a revised Psychological Interventions in Response to Stress & Distress in Dementia event on 26th June in Stirling. Organisers say the event is aimed at those already trained as stress and distress trainers with an operational/strategic remit.

Please see the details in the flyer below, including a link to the application form for those interested in attending.

 

SD Programme Relaunch
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Latest blog from our CEO – Redressing the balance: the potential of homecare

In just over a week Scottish Care will be hosting our annual Care at Home Conference, Exhibition and Awards. It is shaping up to be a great day of debate, a very full exhibition and a real opportunity to celebrate the best of homecare across Scotland in the evening. The title of the event as a whole is ‘Redressing the balance: the potential of homecare.’ To some extent it is a bit disquieting and disappointing that we are still talking about re-dressing the balance of care in Scotland. After all we have had a policy direction of enabling independent living and support in our communities and homely settings for over two decades – and yet we are still talking about re-dressing the balance from acute to community, from health and clinical dominated concepts to social care practice, from time and task commissioning to relationship, trust-based approaches. To redress the balance means to achieve ‘an even distribution of weight to ensure equilibrium within a system.’ It is that care equilibrium that is significantly missing from our current approaches to health and social care in Scotland. That’s what we are after in social care – namely the gain of truly integrated services and supports which we are meant to achieve. At the heart of the debate and all the policy and political priorities in terms of re-dressing the balance is the need to move the focus from reactive response to need on to one which is truly preventative in nature. This is the massive and largely untapped potential of homecare within the whole health and social care system and economy. For what we are seeing in practice on the ground across Scotland is yet more sophisticated approaches to reacting after the horse has bolted. Our eligibility criteria which determine the level at which social care supports and services can be accessed have now reached critical in most parts of the country; and resources for innovation and new models of care are depleted and drained as we seek to keep the ship of care from grounding on the rocks of reality. As a sector with some of the best independent care and support, providers and frontline workers alike are straining under the stress of ever-growing demands being met from ever-tightening funding. It is the care economics of insanity not to recognise that we need to prevent people from accessing the expensive and unhealthy acute system in the first place rather than to seek to respond to their needs once they have been in it. Let us stop people from going to hospital after their latest bout of mental distress and illness; let us prevent unplanned admissions as a result of an unnecessary fall or incident; let us ensure that malnutrition and poor diet, unaddressed lifestyle factors and loneliness are not the vehicles for the inevitable journey into the acute system. But to achieve all that we have to change not just the rhetoric but the reality to properly resource our social care sector in order to enable real prevention to happen. It is not rocket science so why decades after policy initiatives are we still talking and not doing? There is a real opportunity for us to be brave and dynamic, innovative and creative in working together at local level, commissioners, planners and providers in developing models of preventative care which are up to the mark. We can do so much better than we are at present in developing models and approaches which prevent an individual from either early or unnecessary access to enhanced care, hospitalisation or sharper personal physical decline and deterioration. We can do so much better in working together to re-balance care so that we focus on approaches which enable independent living for a longer period of time and which focus on maintaining a higher quality of life and wellbeing. Our obsessive functionalist approach to social care is not only degrading and demeaning of worker and recipient alike, it is a public health hazard and threat. Let us work together to re-balance care by achieving the potential of care at home and housing support, by maximising autonomy and control. Join us on 17th May and get involved in the debate! Dr Donald Macaskill, CEO Scottish Care @DrDMacaskill