Thursday, August 28, 2008

Questions of care, health and our future

For the Scottish Government, Scotland's changing demographics is far from being the taboo subject you suggest in your leader comment of August 27.

We have already committed to providing an additional £40m to further improve care services. In partnership with Cosla, we are working to improve the clarity and delivery of the free personal and nursing care policy, for example on matters such as charging for food preparation and access to services. We are engaged in considering how we can ensure over the coming years that vulnerable older people - our relatives, friends, neighbours and future selves - can continue to receive the care and support they need. All local authorities and their health board partners are engaged with their communities to consider how to restructure services to better meet the needs of our ageing population in the future.

Your story reflects a common misunderstanding: that the total growth in spending on personal and nursing care services for older people arises solely from the free personal and nursing care policy. As Lord Sutherland so clearly outlined in his independent analysis of the policy earlier this year, due to Scotland's ageing population, even without the policy to remove charges from some care services, the demand for and costs of care services would be increasing.

Everyone knows we can afford free personal care if we really want it. In 2006, the Health Select Committee at Westminster had in mind the Scottish example when it stated: "It is clearly for governments to decide their own spending priorities. However, we maintain that, with political will, the resources could be found to fund free personal care".

How true. As a volunteering charity working to practically support older people in the community, WRVS believes we should spend less time fretting with the bean-counters and bureaucrats and more time focusing on the wellbeing of older people that a social care policy such as free personal care secures.

The committee also said: "The question of what is health and what is social care is one to which we can find no satisfactory answer, and which our witnesses were similarly unable to explain in meaningful terms". Perhaps if we all began to accept that free personal care is as much a health question as it is anything else, we'd be more sanguine about rising costs. After all, do any of us want anything other than a healthy, happy old age?

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