Following a recent visit to a Denbighshire Care Home, North Wales MS Mark Isherwood has outlined the pressures they are facing because of the UK Government Budget and called for Welsh Government intervention and support.
In today’s meeting of the Welsh Parliament, Mr Isherwood also raised the Care Home’s concern that placements in Denbighshire are being made ‘solely on the grounds of cost’, and not ‘quality and social value’ as outlined in the ‘National Framework for the Commissioning of Care and Support in Wales Code of Practice’.
Raising the matter in Questions to the Cabinet Secretary for Health and Social Care, he said:
“I recently visited a North Wales Residential Home with Care Forum Wales to discuss issues threatening the sector’s viability.
“In light of the UK Autumn Budget, these included the extra cost of National Insurance contributions and the National Living Wage - and concern that, although the ‘National Framework for the Commissioning of Care and Support in Wales: Code of Practice’, which came into force on 1st September this year under the Social Services and Well-being (Wales) Act 2014, is intended to move current Local Authority commissioning practices ‘away from price towards quality and social value’, and ensure ‘people have voice and control over their care and support’, Denbighshire was making placements solely on the grounds of cost, stating that when it ‘decides to meet a citizen’s eligible needs for care and support by arranging care home accommodation, it's obliged to source that accommodation at, or as near to a rate it believes is sustainable and cost-effective, known as its indicative rate’.
“What support and intervention will the Welsh Government therefore provide for the care sector in these areas?”
Responding, the Minister for Children and Social Care, Dawn Bowden MS, said
“The points that you raised are well made and are things that we're seeing across the country, but there is a framework that is there to enable the provision of social care fees to be developed in partnership between the local authority and, where appropriate, the health service, and that is absolutely what the framework is set out to do. It is not about necessarily introducing consistent or the same fees across the country, but a consistency of approach to ensure that there is no postcode lottery around commissioning fees.
“We've held a number of sessions with commissioners, right the way across Wales, providing them with support and a toolkit to enable them to work in the way that we know will deliver the best outcomes. We're identifying where we've got best practice and we're standardising commissioning of care and support, which I hope, in the longer term, will seek to alleviate the kinds of issues that you've raised today.”
