News

This week's Have your say asks is it useful for service users to know what star rating their local authority was given?

What do you think of the star rating system?

Have your say by clicking here and your comments will appear in this section of the website on 5 July.

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Last week's Have your say debate was about the rights of older people, and we asked are their basic rights being denied once they are placed in a care home? Or is it unrealistic to expect local authorities to offer a wide choice of residential care?

These are the responses we received:

"The real problem no one seems to be addressing is our ability to meet the future needs of older people requiring nursing care. This cannot be provided other than on a 24-hour basis, and it is simply impractical to imagine this can be met through anything other than residential care.

The examples in the article of home care being provided in 15-minute time slots which neither meet physical or social needs only serves to reinforce my argument. Of course, there is a place for home care and sheltered housing and these may represent a better alternative where older people are less dependent - but there is a point at which this will fall down and nursing care is the only answer.

My concern is that we will simply have not either the quantity or quality of services to meet the widely predicted demand from older people from 2005, remembering the 85 years plus population is set to increase by 50 per cent over the next 25 years. At the present time, the inadequacy of fee levels and the short term nature of commitments on the part of the public sector provides no incentive for investment in new care homes to meet the increasing expectations of tomorrow's older people. We urgently need a planned approach to this problem with decisions made about the amount of capacity required and its nature, backed up by realistic funding and long term contractual commitments."

Frank Richardson

chief executive,

Craegmoor Healthcare

"Older people's basic rights are being denied because of the bureaucratic framework in which social workers have to practice. This is the priority in social care now, not the provision of services.

Clients have such a limited choice, determined by which organisations can complete the forms accordingly. Good agencies are not allowed to provide a service because they've been unable to complete the forms in the right way.

Local authorities do not have the funding available to be able to offer a wide range of residential care unfortunately. The governments of the present and the past have continually down-graded older people's services leaving virtually no choice for clients.

Again bureaucracy has lessened choice - homes cannot be flexible in their approach as it's not set up in guidelines. The new minimum care standards are to be welcomed in some ways, but now all you see home managers doing is completing their paperwork."

Anna Fleming

Social worker

East Ham assessment and care management team

"The older people's right to choose is a muddled state of affairs, amidst a variety of interpretations about what constitutes rights and desires.

It would therefore be helpful to cut free once and for all from the traditional, well meaning way of thinking which, is determined to hold onto the historical accident of replicating "work houses" "retro-asylums" (with nicer furnishings) instead of grasping the nettle.

By grasping the nettle I mean, the urgency to start making sure that we slow down the pace of prescribing what and how old people should or should not be treated and ensure that it is them (tomorrow us) who decide.

Any attempts to interfere with that should be subject to the same sanctions as any other interference of criminal nature perpetrated by equally unscrupulous people, but who may and in many instances do, hold different credentials.

Lets move away from the mater/paternalistic, benevolent and intoxicating stereotyping of old people and lets work actively to safeguard the rights of all, to at least, decent treatment from the state (after all our taxes are not low) and from predators such as promoters of institutional care, the majority of who mainly care for increasing profits.

There is a need to meet public expectations that these modern work houses should exist as being "nice places", nice indicating the level of ignorance that the state, the media and many stale thinkers promote. They have no concept that many real pleasures of life such as privacy, space, peace, own time, own company, own table, own bed, own clothes, own radio, own visitors, own letter box, own windows etc. are a personal choice and a right denied in a greater scale, when because of age, people are expected to fit into a chamber of niceties found nice and better by others rather than by older people themselves.

Let's start at the issue of rights from somewhere sensible. The right to access accurate, up-to-date, relevant, and clear information is being denied to most old people today in the UK. It seems reasonable to deduce from this, that all other rights are therefore being denied. To select aspects of older people's humanity to promote worthy but isolated causes, leads to inadvertently contributing to the denial of their rights."

A social worker