Have your say

Community Care’s new online discussion forum
‘Have your say’ offers an opportunity to air your
views about a controversial subject.

This week’s topic is the plight of asylum seekers following the
murder of asylum seeker Firsat Yildiz in Glasgow.

Do you think the government’s dispersal programme is working? Do
you think asylum seekers should be dispersed around the
country?

Have your say by clicking here

Last week’s topics included the National Care Standards
Commission and its effects. Here are the responses we received:

“The NCSC promises to be the care sector’s foot
and mouth crisis, unless they significantly cut down the
bureaucracy and unrealistic targets, and start looking at what
already works well.“

Louise Ross, Leicester

“I am the carer support and development worker
for the National Association of Adult Placement Services (NAAPS).
Among the carers I represent, there is a very strong feeling that
the national minimum standards will have a detrimental effect upon
adult placement provision.

The principles underlying adult placement are that the service
user should have the opportunity for ‘a near normal a family life
as possible’.

With the increasing emphasis on inspection, regulation and
minimum standards, the general feeling among carers is that the
homes in which they live with their service users will become more
institutionalised, thus undermining the principles of a ‘normal’
domestic arrangement. It is for this reason that NAAPS is involved
in lobbying the government for separate standards for adult
placement schemes. This is felt to be the way forward for adult
placement.

Nina Bradshaw, NAAPS

“The new care standards will lead to the
closure of the smaller homely homes that were proposed in the NHS
and Community Care Act. Smaller homes have less working capital to
make renovations, are less able to release staff for training, and
are less able to accommodate the cost of having vacancies.

Homes that provide for minority groups, or specialise in a
particular client group, for instance black elders, or elders who
were lesbians and gay men, will therefore struggle to survive.

Large corporations, running large homes, will be able to meet
the standards more easily.

Also, the concept of ‘good care’ seems to take second place,
perhaps because it is not as easily measurable as room size.

However, techniques such as dementia care mapping could be
used.

Some clients do very well in large scale homes, perhaps if they
have previously had good experiences in boarding school or a
children’s home. Conversely other clients who have had bad
experiences of institutional life will not have their emotional and
psychological needs met in a large residential or nursing home.

I believe in principle that national standards are a good idea,
but they certainly do not level out the playing field, in fact they
skew it to the advantage of large companies.

The only way that a range of care settings could be maintained,
and national standards applied, is if some financial assistance was
given to smaller homes to help them to
survive.“

Anonymous