For all the sound ideals of the Quality Care Campaign, it will take a lot more than a bit of extra funding to realise them, writes Terry Philpot
There's a long-running tension within social care between aspiration and achievement: what we would like and what we can provide.
However, there can be fewer gaps so yawning as between what the Quality
Care Campaign wants for residential care and its day-to-day realities.
Commissioning on the basis of quality not cost; placing residential
care "at the heart of communities" and its recognition as a career for
young people; and ensuring that every home complies with minimum
standards. Who could disagree with these?
And who is to disagree either with the intentions that negative perceptions and stereotypes should be challenged to highlight the vital role of homes and that there should be robust costing models that enable providers to offer quality care?
Negative stereotypes are too often fed by government. The impetus for the adoption law reforms was Tony Blair's belief that children and young people were languishing in residential care. In fact, overwhelmingly, they are fostered and most of those in residential care are there because it is appropriate for them or they do not seek fostering or adoption.
Now the personalisation policy does not regard residential care as the "positive choice", in the words of the Wagner committee 20 years ago. When direct payments cannot be used to purchase residential care, choice, for those in Whitehall, has its limits. Such a stance may grow from what is possibly the biggest misperception about residential care, at least for older people, that it is only necessary because families no longer "care". This underscores the idea of the service being, by implication, an undesirable last resort. In fact, for decades the percentage of older people in residential care has remained constant at about 4%.
Good quality care relies on well-trained and well-motivated staff. It is perhaps remarkable that there is as much good quality care as there is when staff are lucky to be paid much more than the minimum wage in exchange for working with vulnerable, frail and sometimes challenging people.
To achieve what the Quality Care Campaign wants will take more than a bit of extra funding here, a change of policy there. It will require a seismic cultural change, which will demand a vastly different way of society and government viewing residential care and those who use it.
Terry Philpot, a former editor of Community Care, is currently editing a book on residential care to be published later this year
And who is to disagree either with the intentions that negative perceptions and stereotypes should be challenged to highlight the vital role of homes and that there should be robust costing models that enable providers to offer quality care?
Negative stereotypes are too often fed by government. The impetus for the adoption law reforms was Tony Blair's belief that children and young people were languishing in residential care. In fact, overwhelmingly, they are fostered and most of those in residential care are there because it is appropriate for them or they do not seek fostering or adoption.
Now the personalisation policy does not regard residential care as the "positive choice", in the words of the Wagner committee 20 years ago. When direct payments cannot be used to purchase residential care, choice, for those in Whitehall, has its limits. Such a stance may grow from what is possibly the biggest misperception about residential care, at least for older people, that it is only necessary because families no longer "care". This underscores the idea of the service being, by implication, an undesirable last resort. In fact, for decades the percentage of older people in residential care has remained constant at about 4%.
Good quality care relies on well-trained and well-motivated staff. It is perhaps remarkable that there is as much good quality care as there is when staff are lucky to be paid much more than the minimum wage in exchange for working with vulnerable, frail and sometimes challenging people.
To achieve what the Quality Care Campaign wants will take more than a bit of extra funding here, a change of policy there. It will require a seismic cultural change, which will demand a vastly different way of society and government viewing residential care and those who use it.
Terry Philpot, a former editor of Community Care, is currently editing a book on residential care to be published later this year
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