Crunch time for care services
Crunch time for care services
Crunch time for care services
The eye-watering level of debt that the UK's coalition government is faced with presents a unique challenge, one that's been met with plans for large-scale cuts to public services.
The government is trying to encourage private sector growth to offset the effect of cuts, but for people in some parts of the public sector, the outlook is grim.
Structural change has been mooted in several departments, and the cancellation of some major procurement programmes is one way of enacting this, particularly with relation to the National Identity Card scheme and DNA database. Changes to these systems early can save government money before the bulk of it has been spent.
In other departments, too, structural change has been mooted. Defence Secretary Liam Fox, has said he will be looking to reorder Ministry of Defence business into three discrete strands. Other departments, too, have heeded the idea that change is overdue.
The changes mentioned so far have been ideological, but such changes are not proposed across all of government, and many areas are facing the prospect of cuts with little or no change.
Martin Green, chief executive of the English Community Care Association is calling for care services to take centre stage and remind government of their economic, as well as social, importance in order to avoid the worst of the cuts.
To do this, Green says care services should play up their economic strengths and "talk the language that government hears rather than that that it wants to turn away from" whilst not giving up their values-driven core. He wants care services to remind government that the sector is economically active as both an employer and a consumer, setting the stage for a proposed restructuring intended to make care services more efficient for good.
Alongside this, he calls for a renewed focus on outcomes and service users and a shifting of resources from structures and transactional costs into direct services. In all, nothing short of root and branch reform of care services, an end to "paternalistic" provision and a move towards integrating health and social care budgets to end the "turf wars" between the two.
"We are in very uncharted waters as far as the level of deficit is concerned and this, combined with demographic change, will make a radical approach to care provision the only option in the future," Green wrote on Publicservice.co.uk. "Our financial position is a tremendous threat to traditional services, but I would argue that they have already had their day.
"The 20th century paternalistic structured approach to the delivery of care services has to give way to person-centred support, enablement and flexibility and now might be our moment to deliver it. For too long, decisions about care have been framed by the needs of staff and of structures we need to change that and radically review how we engage in a citizenship approach to care and support."
"Our current financial difficulties create an enormous challenge, but they are also an unrivalled opportunity because the challenge is so great and the resources so inadequate the debate about change can no longer be about maintaining the status quo versus changing it. It can only be about radical solutions, different approaches and better use of resources. This is not a discussion item. It is an imperative."
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