Social Care & Health

The big political parties won’t touch the issue of social care. They think it’s a minefield – too expensive to improve, but so close to collapse they don’t want to be seen to be offering only half measures. We think that’s irresponsible. If you don’t want to tackle tough issues, don’t stand for election.

Flintshire People’s Voice believes everyone deserves a high standard of care if ever they need it. We also believe that the people of Flintshire are willing to pay what it costs to ensure that everyone in our community can live with dignity. Maybe we’re wrong – Labour and the Tories think you stop caring about older or disabled people as soon as the word tax is mentioned – but we reckon they underestimate the compassion in our county.

FPV’s first priority in social care is to fix what is already going wrong. At the moment, we are paying a fortune in bidding wars for limited specialist care places, especially for children and young people, and these places are sometimes hundreds of miles away. This isn’t good for service users, and it isn’t good for taxpayers. The only winners are the private care companies raking in the profits.

Homecare provision in our county is not as good as everyone involved would like. Care workers are overworked, with time slots too short to do everything necessary, and grindingly low pay and mileage rates meaning many work other jobs just to make ends meet, leading to tiredness in the short term and people leaving the profession in the long term, causing more staff shortages and even shorter slots for service users.

Private care homes are seen as lucrative investments by multimillionaires, who load them up with debt, asset strip them, and sell them on. Eventually the financial strain leads to a collapse, with some homes seeing residents evicted at a few days notice, but even before it gets to that horrible stage, lack of maintenance sees corners cut, reduced activities for residents, and fees skyrocket.

Is this good enough? No.

FPV in power will start by paying a real living wage, and full reimbursement for mileage, to all care workers. We will bring these staff in house, giving job security. The reduced flexibility that moving away from agencies causes the council can be offset by using any extra service capacity to provide cover to neighbouring local authorities on an agency basis. We will drive up staff satisfaction and staff retention rates, giving service users regular carers over the long term, and giving staff time to care.

We will continue the programme for more local authority run care homes and sheltered housing projects, removing the profit motive from residential care, and enabling staff and management to focus on residents rather than keeping shareholders happy.

We will invest in specialist care provision for highly complex cases. These are often the most difficult and expensive to place outside the county. The present administration thinks it isn’t worth it as we have so few cases in Flintshire that it isn’t worth running our own; we say offer extra places to nearby authorities, taking the money that private providers would have gained in profit from those other councils and use it to improve our own services for our own residents. Private providers are making a fortune – why shouldn’t the council enter the market instead, and put the money they’d make to better use?

All of this gets us back to the bare minimum level of provision we should already be offering. But we won’t stop there.

In power, FPV will take the best practice from around the world and build it into our care model here. For dementia care, the Dutch model of dementia villages offers clear positive benefits over the more traditional nursing home system. This focuses on smaller residential units, built to look like ordinary houses from outside, each shared by a small number of residents and carers. Communal facilities, such as hairdressers, restaurants and cinemas are provided in separate, nearby buildings, with landscaped grounds between. The community is fully enclosed, allowing a safe and secure environment but one which maintains familiarity and as close an experience to life without dementia as possible. The results speak for themselves; residents live longer, require less medication, and relatives report higher satisfaction. We will build a dementia village here in Flintshire, the first in Wales, to ensure residents of our area can benefit from this.

Across the border in Chester, a new and innovative approach is being taken by Belong Chester, which has won plaudits for its approach to intergenerational living, combining a care home and a nursery. FPV would seek to operate the same model in a purpose-built local authority home in Flintshire.

Talking about local authority provision is only a small fraction of the overall picture, with most care being given by family carers. Often left with little support, the social care system and indeed the entire country could not cope without them. We will seek to dramatically expand the range of support on offer, while recognising that the design of any new and expanded support must be designed by those who need it rather than a top-down approach with the exact form set out in our manifesto. The council’s current offer does not reach a significant number of people, and it is these carers who are not currently accessing this help that should be at the forefront of the process. We will seek to engage this group by proactively offering conversations about what support they would benefit from during interactions with other relevant council services, such as blue badge applications, severe mental impairment council tax letters, and assisted bin collection requests to give some examples.

We will continue the work already being undertaken to support foster carers, both in terms of financial and other benefits, the fostering network, and in particular the rollout of the Mockingbird Family Model. We will maintain dialogue with foster carers about how support can be further extended most effectively, recognising that foster carers benefit looked-after children immensely.

FPV is fully committed to maintaining excellence in children’s services, and will never support any cut which puts at risk any child in Flintshire. We believe that strong, loving families are the best environment for children, and we will provide all the support we can, such as through a well funded family group meeting service, to support families of children in need.

Betsi Cadwaladr Health Board is not performing as it should, and, as a result, Flintshire residents are being placed at unnecessary risk. While health remains the responsibility of the Welsh Government, Flintshire People’s Voice believes that the council should take a much more active role in discussions on the health board’s future, ensuring local people’s views are heard. We will also ensure that the council scrutinises cross-border arrangements, with care at the Countess of Chester hospital becoming increasingly difficult for North Wales residents to access even when it is their closest hospital.

While all of our neighbouring councils include a major hospital, Flintshire doesn’t, making us uniquely dependent on community-based solutions. We will work tirelessly to ensure that our area is not left voiceless and forgotten when it comes to health board management in Bangor – fighting for a fair share of newly trained GPs to be placed in our communities, campaigning to end the dentist desert that leaves a sore tooth meaning a massive wait, and ensuring that health board reorganisation doesn’t lead to service closures at community hospitals in our county.

We also fully support the steps taken by Flintshire County Council through the discharge to assess scheme to reduce the number of people being unnecessarily moved out of their own homes and into social care beds when this is not necessary. This allows for discharge from hospital into a short term residential facility in Flintshire, where a rounded assessment can be carried out of the patient’s needs, as well as re-ablement and physical therapy to help those who can go back to their homes, instead of being discharged into a care home far earlier than necessary, curtailing individual independence and increasing costs to the public purse. FPV welcomes this innovative approach, and an FPV administration will ensure that it is protected.