More than 150,000 members of the public have signed a petition and over 50 health leaders have put their signatures to an open letter - calling on the new Prime Minister, Boris Johnson, to urgently address the escalating crisis in care.
The petition, believed to be the largest of its kind, urges the Prime Minister to end social care cuts which have left many older people in England unable to access the care and support they need.
Both the petition and signed letter were organised by the NHS Confederation which leads the Health for Care coalition of 15 national health organisations who have joined forces to make the case for social care.
Niall Dickson, chief executive of the NHS Confederation, said: “The level of distress being experienced by hundreds of thousands of vulnerable people and their carers is now much greater and on a wider scale than at any time in living memory.
“This is a crisis and it has to be urgently addressed. We welcome the Prime Minister’s early commitment to find a solution. As our petition shows, the public recognise the human cost of inaction and they want this resolved. Successive governments have failed to address this issue – the new Government has a chance to put this right.”
The signatories of the open letter span hospital, mental health, community services and clinical commissioning groups up and down the country. In the letter, NHS leaders welcomed the new Prime Minister’s commitment to ‘fix the crisis in social care once and for all’. However, they have called for:
• Cross-party talks to help deliver a more sustainable social care system backed up by a long-term financial settlement.
• Immediate funding increases in the upcoming one-year government spending review that is being conducted this autumn to shore up care services in the short term.
• Genuine long-term funding alongside key reforms to help deliver a solution for social care that lasts a generation and more. This must include a widening of the eligibility criteria to ensure those people most in need get the care and support they require.
Siobhan Melia, chief executive of Sussex Community NHS Foundation Trust, said: “Vulnerable people are facing unacceptable delays in accessing the care that they need due to a dearth of provision of social care packages. This means that NHS teams are caring for people longer than they need to, placing increased demand on community and hospital services.
“It will simply be impossible to deliver the ambition in the NHS Long Term Plan to join up health and care services in local communities, and to support people to age well without immediate action to reform the social care system.”
Michael Wilson, chief executive of Surrey and Sussex Healthcare NHS Trust, said: “If we want our health and social care system to be sustainable, then we need to act urgently to resolve this crisis.
“For example, a total of 850,000 people in the UK live with dementia – this is set to increase to more than 1 million by 2025. This challenge is not going away.
“We have consistently talked about these problems and we now need to agree a range of solutions, which provide the best possible care.”
In a separate report published by the Health for Care coalition, it has been estimated that a cash injection of £1.1bn to £2.5bn is required to maintain the status quo in social care.
This funding gap is set to increase, with estimates from the Personal Social Services Research Unit at the London School of Economics suggesting the number of older people needing publicly funded social care could increase by 300,000 by 2035 – a rise of 69 per cent.