Residential & Home Care Show
journey to the show involved the train, the Docklands Light Railway, and the London Underground, and very few people wore masks on any of these. As for the Residential & Home Care Show itself, mask wearing on the show floor was practically non-existent. Time will tell whether such confidence is evidence-led or merely wishful thinking.
A need for debate
I sat in on the Access to care panel hosted by Adam Purnell, director of the Social Care Institute of Health and Social Care Management (IHSCM), Jon Wilks, CEO of IHSCM, John Powell, professor of digital healthcare, Sue Jones, director of the Thoughts Become Things care consultancy, and Dr Jane Townson, CEO of the Homecare Association. The difference in tone between this panel and Jonathan Papworth’s talk was stark, with the anger and frustration I saw at Care England’s Facing the future and The King’s Fund’s Future of care back in March very much in evidence, as these leading experts railed against the lack of progress, lack of reform, and lack of funding in social care. The panel were clear that despite decades of talking about the acute problems facing the sector, we were still no closer to proper recognition of social care or any meaningful reform. It was pointed out that the Care Act 2014 had seemed to contain the tools needed for this reform, but that ‘nothing’ had happened then and, according to the panel, it looked as though ‘nothing’ was going to happen now. The panel also agreed, echoing what Jonathan Papworth had said, that the NHS and social care ‘speak different languages.’ More damningly, Adam Purnell said that the very language used to describe social
The lack of a career pathway, in contrast to the many careers available in the NHS, is problematic
care was wrong – with the event’s umbrella banner, Health ‘Plus’ Care, cited as being indicative of the attitude that social care was merely a ‘bolt on’ to healthcare and of lesser importance. Themes familiar to anyone who had attended the March events were again discussed: low wages, a lack of parity with the NHS, a lack of public awareness, and the lament that a brief, narrow window of pandemic-induced visibility for the sector had now passed. There was, agreed the panel, a need for ‘large scale public debate’ and Dr Jane Townson spoke of ‘a duty and responsibility to make the public understand’ the crisis facing social care, but there seems to be little chance of any such thing happening, and no obvious mechanism for triggering it. The fact remains that people are probably never going to take to the streets to demand social care reform (not, that is, until it’s too late). Being old and being cared for is still not something we like to think about. The panel also touched on digital
technology, suggesting that the way things were currently being done - with digital innovation being led by developers rather than the people actually working in social care - was back to front.
Changing the rhetoric By now, lunchtime beckoned, and my rumbling stomach was grateful that I had accepted an invitation from apetito to attend a lunchtime session with Nadra Ahmed OBE, chairman of the National Care Association. In a fascinating talk, Nadra discussed the challenges that everybody in social care will all too familiar with – public perception of what social care is, and people’s expectations of what will happen to them when they get old and frail, what care they will require, and
June 2022
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