An overhaul for adult care

摘要

Scanning the headlines last week, a casual reader could be forgiven for thinking the problems in adult social care in the UK can be addressed by funding alone. Those at the service delivery end, however - from the local authorities commissioning care to the care workers, patients and their families experiencing the day-to-day reality of the system - see a very different story.Adult social care is broken. Years of marketisation and outsourcing have left the UK with a service where large market players dominate, particularly in areas such as nursing and residential care: extracting taxpayers' money and the savings of older people for shareholder gain. Proposals to fund social care through National Insurance contributions are not only wrongheaded and insufficient to the task, they also miss the wider point of what ails the sector as well as the opportunity to truly reform it.