CM Special Report

One size can never fit all. While councils are adopting tools and processes to personalise services, they must ensure that the way they use those tools makes their services more personal where it really counts – at the point people experience them. Good quality plans, strategies and reconfigured services are all vitally important, but if someone’s immediate carer isn’t working in a person-centred way, then high level strategies won’t make much difference to the person on the receiving end. This is particularly true of people with dementia. Recently, over 73 organisations committed to a Dementia Action Alliance that will work towards transforming the quality of life of people living with dementia in the UK. Amongst their declarations was a commitment to delivering personal choice and support that is designed around the person and that helps them live the life they want and be part of a community.

Voyage’s chief executive, Bruce McKendrick, who joined the company in 2010 after working in the leisure industry, tells CCMn about his first year in the care sector and shares his thoughts on how private equity-owned care providers can help to improve quality and standards in the sector.

The impact of the Panorama coverage of events at Winterbourne View earlier this year continues to cause tremors across the health and social care sector long after that particular disaster has been addressed. But what impact have those events had on the policy backdrop to adult safeguarding, and where do the unseen influences from those events now rest?

Last month saw the biggest shake up of the country’s major long term care providers for well over a decade, with the reassignment of care facilities formerly run by Southern Cross Healthcare leading to considerable changes among independent companies working in the sector.

In the past few weeks the not-for-profit elderly care provider Methodist Homes has rolled out a successful rebrand, been name-checked in the inaugural Laing’s Healthcare 20 and has taken a leap up the major providers table thanks to its ability to take on a healthy slice of homes formerly run by Southern?Cross.

Celebrating the best in independent healthcare

The arguments are well rehearsed by Andrew Dilnot in his report: we need to act now to decide both the policy and legal framework for the future funding of long-term care. That it needs resolution has broad agreement; the mechanics of how are yet to be decided.

Although demand for extra care housing from social services, tenants and private leaseholders continues apace, the development of new stock will do little other than progress slowly until the housing market improves and government funding becomes available again.

With 60 residential care homes in its healthcare portfolio, Care UK has presented findings from a pilot scheme held across nine of its specialist dementia homes and a day centre in Surrey, which show that dementia care services as provided within residential care homes do have the ability to improve the well-being of residents by up to 40% - according to evaluation criteria based on research from Bradford University to measure residents’ moods and levels of interaction.

On 19 July the DWP finally released Housing Benefit Reform, its long awaited, and far-reaching, proposals for the reform of housing benefits, in relaiton to supported housing, including consideration of exempt accommodation regulations.