Simon Bottery from the King’s Fund gave the fourth Annual CHAD Guest Lecture on Wednesday March 27th at Staffordshire University, Leek Road Campus, Stoke-on-Trent.
After 10 years as Director of Policy at Independent Age, Simon joined The King’s Fund in September 2017. He was vice-chair of the Care and Support Alliance in 2017 and co-authored the King’s Fund’s influential report on social care funding, A Fork in the Road in 2018. In this lecture, he will preview a report to be published in mid-April which maps trends in around 20 key indicators in adult social care.
Simon was just completing a report commissioned by the King’s Fund (available here) on the provision of adult social care across the UK, based upon a wide-ranging and detailed analysis of available data-sets. The CHAD guest lecture was an opportunity to hear a ‘sneak preview’ of the main points of the report, and to discuss some of their implications.
Among the key findings are:
- The increasing demand for support for working-age adults. The costs for working-age adults are rising, as increasing numbers identify themselves as having a disability. By contrast, the cost of social care for older people has levelled off or even reduced, when allowance is made for the increasing numbers of older people. Some of this may be because of more efficient use of resources, but there is also evidence of significant unmet need
- There is under-investment in preventive services, which links to sharp rises in the number of emergency admissions for patients aged 85 years or older and in admissions for patients with multiple health conditions. Investment in prevention remains at a very low level
- Local Authority indicators are declining, while national government indicators are tending to increase. The most obvious example is that the number of carers supported by local government has fallen over the past four years while the number receiving Carer’s Allowance, a national benefit, has nearly doubled. This suggest that Local Authorities’ “room for manoeuvre” is reducing.
