Source · Select Committees · Housing, Communities and Local Government Committee
Recommendation 27
27
Accepted
Paragraph: 118
We heard repeatedly that an absolutely critical lever for stabilising the adult social care market...
Conclusion
We heard repeatedly that an absolutely critical lever for stabilising the adult social care market was tackling staff shortages and low retention. This would widen access to care and help to give unpaid carers a much-needed break. There is also the very real risk that the Government’s charging reforms do not immediately improve matters, for instance by drawing more people into the care system without having enough workers to deliver the care for which these people will now be eligible. We were repeatedly told that the solution is to increase wages. It is little consolation to hear from the Minister for Care and Mental Health that only a fifth of the workforce is on the National Minimum Wage when we know how many workers are leaving the sector for higher paid jobs in other sectors, and that the sector struggles to compete with the NHS. While increasing wages would come at a cost, we were encouraged to see this as an investment because of the connection between wages and quality of care, the extra spending in our economy by better paid care workers, and the cost savings of retaining staff over having to hire more expensive agency staff. The Government’s proposals for health and care workforce integration in the Joining up Care for People, Places and Populations White Paper are welcome, but they must include a requirement to work towards achieving parity of pay for comparable roles across the NHS and social care. The Government’s guidance for fair cost of care exercises should require councils and providers to move towards pay rates for care workers that align with the NHS and that reward more senior staff with meaningfully higher pay than entry level workers.
Government Response Summary
The government welcomes the committee’s interest in shared care records and notes its Digital Health and Care Plan sets out that health and care professionals will have access to a comprehensive view of a person’s health record by April 2025.
Paragraph Reference:
118
Government Response
Accepted
HM Government
Accepted
We welcome the committee’s interest in the government’s ambition to have shared care records for all citizens. The Digital Health and Care Plan, published in June 2022, sets out our expectation that by April 2025, health and care professionals will have authorised access to a comprehensive view of a person’s health record, including their medications and key aspects of their health and care history and plans. In 2021–22 we funded all integrated care systems (ICSs) to acquire a basic shared record system, and these are now being implemented across the country. One of the more advanced implementations, the London Care Record, is accessed more than a million times a month while other programmes in the North East, Yorkshire & the Humber, the North West, Hampshire, Bristol and Dorset and across Thames Valley and Surrey all have mature solutions which are supporting health and care professionals deliver integrated care. In many cases providers of social care services are already engaged and authorised staff are able to access relevant information about the people they care for from their local Shared Care Record, saving time spent in chasing information from busy GPs and hospitals. As well as sharing information about the records, as part of the programme we are supporting local systems to develop care planning systems involving local health and social care providers, as well as individuals and their carers. Ready access to such shared care plans is especially important in urgent care situations. We have recently sponsored work in Suffolk and North East Essex ICS to develop an urgent care plan solution with a high level of patient and carer input. This co-production Government response 37 approach places patients and carers as equal partners in the creation of their urgent care plans, and provides the means for them to enter their personal wishes into the care plan, which can then be accessed by the health and care professionals involved in their care. We have a set of metrics which we use to measure the progress of integration of the digital care record systems of social care providers into their local ICB shared care record. Recognising the differing speeds at which these local programmes have progressed, we continue work to capture and share knowledge and learning from the early implementors in order to drive uptake and adoption across the rest of the country. 38 Government response Discharge Conclusion 36 – discharge to assess funding Conclusion 36 - We are not reassured by the Director General for Adult Social Care’s comments that some places have found ways to continue discharge to assess funding from their own funding streams, not least by her admission that these workarounds are only short-term and only “for the bits of it they think are vital”. The discharge to assess funding was an excellent example of effective health and care integration