Social care crisis sees elderly facing 'care deserts'

Older people looking for residential care face a postcode lottery, with some experiencing ‘care deserts’ where there is literally no care to be had.

The new report from Age UK shows just under a third of areas in England have no care home beds and nearly two-thirds have no nursing home beds. The charity estimates that as many as 1.3m people aged 65 and over are not getting the care they need.

‘Care deserts: the impact of a dysfunctional market in adult social care provision’, which analysed 7,500 postcode districts, found nurse vacancy rates are rising and the number of hours of care is falling, even though demand for care has continued to increase.

Caroline Abrahams, charity director at Age UK said: “This new report shows how chaotic and broken the market for care has become after years of underfunding and the absence of determined Government action to ensure the right workforce is in place.

"The end result is laid bare by the authors – the emergence of care deserts and a deeply worrying lack of nursing home places, in particular, leaving some of our most vulnerable older people high and dry."

She added that the report shows “what an impossible position local authorities are in” as they are supposed to ‘manage’ their local care market, but they lack the levers to do so.

Consequently the burden of funding care is being placed onto older people who fund their own care, who Ms Abrahams, says “are paying through the nose to keep the system afloat. This is deeply unfair”.

Forty-one per cent of older people living in residential care are now self-funders, with 18 per cent of these in the North East and 54 per cent in the South East.

In addition, the report highlights that the vacancy rate for nurses working in social care tripled to 12 per cent between 2012/13 and 2017/18, with the turnover rate now standing at nearly a third of roles.

The study also revealed that despite a slight rise in the total number of care home beds over the last five years, some areas such as Hull have lost over a third of their beds in the last three years.

Incisive Health which compiled the report concludes ‘in 2017, the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) argued that the market-based approach to social care was unsustainable without additional public sector funding. Based on our findings, we can go further: the current model has broken down in some areas of the country and is no longer capable of delivering care to people in need.’

Incisive Health looked at different regions in the UK and found areas such as Guildford where there are a high number of self-funders, there is a good spread of services. However care homes in the South East are more reliant on overseas workers, and so care homes there could be heavily affected by Brexit.

In the South West, there seems to be limited capacity outside of major urban areas. While in Norfolk, services are more evenly distributed but still thinly spread, so some people only have ‘inadequate’ care homes as an option.

Kieran Lucia, account director at Incisive Health, called the social care system “broken” and said: “Despite the best efforts of the dedicated social care workforce, years of political inaction and budget cuts to local authorities have resulted in a system that is no longer capable of delivering care to everyone who needs it.

“Urgent action is needed to stabilise the system and set it on the course to delivering sustainable care in the long-term. The Green Paper cannot come soon enough.”