A new approach to fix crisis in social care

People are sometimes waiting hours on end for an ambulance

The reality of “delayed discharge” is causing an interruption in flow throughout the whole of the NHS. For non life-threatening callouts, people are sometimes waiting hours on end for an ambulance. This is in large part due to the fact that there simply aren’t any ambulances available, as they are often queued up outside A&E departments, providing care to patients who can’t be taken inside. Why? Because A&E is too full.

None of this is a result of some kind of deficiency in emergency care, but rather a symptom of A&E departments being unable to admit their patients into the main hospital because there are no beds to receive them. When I tell you that it costs nearly £500 a night to keep someone in hospital, it seems like a grotesque waste of public funds to keep someone in one of those beds who neither needs nor wants to be there.

The answer to all of this is to fix the crisis in social care. To make home care a profession of choice by paying people an attractive wage with the support and conditions necessary to keep them caring. But the SNP have got their response to this crisis entirely wrong.

In typical Big Brother-knows-best fashion, the Scottish Government have framed their response to this crisis around the assumption that the social care partnerships responsible for the delivery of care in our communities simply don’t know what they’re doing. As such they have sought to asset strip those partnerships and move control for the deliver of care to Scottish ministers. To do this they have developed plans for a vast bureaucracy which they have misleadingly called the National Care Service.

Since the very start, the Scottish Liberal Democrats have opposed this ministerial takeover of social care. Initially we were among only a few voices in that regard, but have since been joined by councils, trade unions, service users and now all other opposition parties. Last week the SNP asked for another delay to the legislation currently before parliament. All told, the Scottish Government has wasted four years and £30 million (the annual salary of 1200 care workers) on this white elephant.

To fix social care in our country the SNP need to abandon their power grab once and for all and dedicate the millions that frees up to offer our care workers a decent wage. They also need to do more for unpaid family carers as well.

Thanks to Liberal Democrats in the UK parliament, unpaid carers are now entitled to additional leave so they can better balance work with their caring commitments. And thanks to Ed Davey, carers in England will be allowed to work more hours and earn more money before they are cut off from the carers allowance. As this benefit is being fully devolved to Scotland, I’ve asked for the Scottish Government to make the same change. Paid or unpaid, our nation’s carers are the unsung heroes of our efforts to keep people well and out of hospital, we lose them at our peril.

Alex Cole-Hamilton is leader of the Scottish Liberal Demorats