News

Dear PM,

At the time of writing, you have many issues to address, I’m sure. But deal or no deal, the pressures on social care are currently at crisis point.

The Rising Costs of Social Care

Across the country, care homes and agencies are buckling under the mounting debts and inability to provide the service that our elderly generation so greatly deserve. A recent pledge by the government to give an extra £650million to social care does not go nearly far enough to bridge the widening gap between the specialist needs that are abundant in care and the treatment that the service users actually receive. Around £240 million of that grant funding is expected to be awarded specifically to adult social care, which sounds like a lot until you realise that the current shortfall stands at around £2.4billion.

Of course, there is hope in the form of a green paper on the reforms of the adult social care that is yet to be published. Promised to the country back in 2017, this long overdue report remains as elusive as ever – will it help relieve the strain of social care, or bring yet more disappointment to a system already at breaking point? Will it ever appear at all?

Finding New Staff

One of the biggest challenges in the social system is the recruitment of new staff. As our population ages, bringing with it more service users, so do our employees. Recruiting and retaining staff will only get more and more difficult as Brexit makes it harder for migrants to come and seek work in our country. Lotus Home Care recognises that this is an industry-wide problem, affecting the NHS as much as social care. These are two services that need to work seamlessly alongside each other in order to provide the best care for our older members of the community. If both are struggling, then service users will always find it difficult to get the right standard of care.

Providing Outstanding Care

At Lotus Home Care, we are feeling the pressures the same as anyone else. We aim to provide an exceptional level of care and have a wonderful staff full of empathetic, practical people. We want our service users to feel safe and secure at all times and our staff to feel a sense of pride in their work. We will face every problem head on and find ways to work around them, but it is time the government looked at how they can make it easier for care services to support their users, since so many people around the country rely on us.