Stoke-on-Trent must change care services to adapt to funding squeeze

LOOMING Government spending cuts will force social services to find more efficient ways of helping vulnerable residents, managers have warned.

But they say they will not let the quality of frontline care services deteriorate due to cutbacks.

Mark Palethorpe, Stoke-on-Trent City Council’s head of adult services and partnerships, has told councillors that the authority’s strategy of providing personalised care for older people will help it adapt to any funding cuts.

Mr Palethorpe said that efficiency measures will include sharing offices with NHS staff and other key partners, paying charities to provide some services and cutting out unnecessary bureaucracy in the care system.

And he said that, by channelling more money and effort into early intervention care initiatives to help older residents enjoy more independent lives, the council and the city’s primary care trust would avoid paying higher bills later on resulting from hospital admissions and costly long-term support packages.

He said: “We are faced with a real change in terms of the money we will receive in the future, but if we don’t deliver on the things we said we were going to, such as prevention and early intervention, and get those right, then we will just store up problems for ourselves in the future.

“We will have more people coming to us as crisis cases, hitting the doors of the A&E unit or calling us out of hours when people are at their most vulnerable.”

But Mr Palethorpe said the task of improving care services in the face of falling budgets will require a total change of approach.

He said: “At the moment we are quite focused on the task and we will put a care package together that will be quite prescriptive.

“It will get you out of bed at a certain time and get you dressed, washed and fed, but we could plan this in a different way to ensure people don’t become so isolated.

“It is about enabling people to become as independent as possible.”

Councillor Adrian Knapper raised concerns that many older residents may be confused by the council’s complex direct payments system to allow them to buy-in their own care services.

He also called for care and support assessments to be made simpler.

He said: “We seem to have more staff assessing people than we do actually delivering services. There should be fewer people doing the assessing and more people doing the delivering.

“Also, people who have never even used a cheque book before are going to be confused by the direct payments system.

“If we are trying to improve the quality of people’s lives, then we should actually do that, but we’re not.”

Councillor John Davis, chairman of the North Staffordshire Older People’s Association, said he fears the changes will just save money, without improving services.

He said: “The biggest mistake we ever made was shutting the old-style day care centres, because they were wonderful and provided people with some kind of social life.”

“Then we said people could stay in their own communities and we would give them some money to go to the pub or bingo, but it was all about saving money and it didn’t benefit the users.

“A lot of elderly people are suffering in isolation today and they deserve the best care we can afford.”