Q&A – Professor Martin Green, Care England


TCHE:Are there any other technology targets you’d like to see?


Green: I would like to see far more technology used within services. For example, I went to a care home where there was a man who was telling me he was quite frail, so when he gets out of bed at night there is a tunnel of light that directs him to his bathroom. There is a pressure pad on his bed so staff are alerted that he’s got out of bed and, if he doesn’t get back into bed within a reasonable time, staff can speak to him via an intercom system and ask if he’s OK instead of entering his room. That is low level technology but it really


improves his quality of life and gives him more independence. It also means the staff don’t have to run round the building after him.


TCHE: How could the government incentivise uptake of digital technology?


Green: There are a few incentives but they need to be better packaged together. One of the things that came out of the White Paper is a technology fund. I hope that will be used to lever the use of technology. It would also be good if there was more proactivity about enabling people to take it up.


TCHE:What are your views on the government’s plans to more closely integrate health and social care?


Green: I want to reclaim the term integration. When the government talks about integration, they are obsessed with talking about organisation. So they talk about the NHS, they talk about local


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authorities and, very occasionally, they talk about care providers. But this misses the point. Real integration is about how you as a service user experiences the service. They all say to me, ‘Oh, but it’s all very complicated, you know, these are big organisations’. I say to them that when I fly on a plane there is an enormous amount of bureaucracy going on in the background but all I experience is going from A to B. The problem in which integration is framed in this context is it’s always about the NHS and local authorities but its’s never about people. We’ve got to start thinking about it in a different way.


TCHE: How effective do you see the Dilnot- style cost cap being?


Green: The reality is the cost cap will affect few people because the majority of people who into services are people who are near the end of their lives. The cost cap is also linked to assessments by the local authority, so it is them who decide who goes in to care and at what point.


So if I am at home and having support that is stopping me from going to the next level of dependency, that won’t be covered in my cap. The estimates are that the cap will only affect 30-40% of people. As it goes through the House of Lords, there will be a lot of scrutiny.


TCHE:The Migration Advisory Committee recently urged immediate changes to immigration rules for social care staff due to the post-Brexit impact on the adult social care sector…..


Green: We’ve been involved with the Migration Advisory Committee for a long


time and one of the things we’ve told them is we need to attract staff from overseas, particularly in nursing where there is a chronic shortage within social care. Unhelpfully, the government has said it will give £3,000 to every NHS Trust that recruits an overseas nurse but they haven’t delivered the same for the social care sector. The government needs to stop linking salaries to the ability to recruit foreign care staff because the levels are not sustainable anyway.


TCHE:Finally, what can Care England members expect from the organisation in 2022?


Green: We’ll be focusing very much on the social care workforce because that is the biggest challenge for our members. We will be thinking about how we influence both the recruitment and the retention of staff. We’ll be putting pressure on the government to do in England what they’ve done in Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland – pay a bonus to care staff for what they did during the pandemic and linking it to a retention bonus.


We’ll also be doing a lot of work on the White Papers, trying to refine them and make them more useful to the care sector and ultimately to citizens. We’ll be spending quite a lot of our energy on that. We’re also going to focus on technology.


We’ve talked about the importance of that in improving outcomes and efficiencies. We’ll be doing quite a lot on the new integrated care boards and make sure they understand social care. All these will be our key priorities for 2022, as well as the overall issue of funding.


n www.thecarehomeenvironment.com January 2022


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