If you’ve not watched our feature on Darren McGarvey’s: The State We’re In, you can still catch it on BBC iPlayer.
If you have watched it, you will have noticed how many questions the programme raises about why health and social care is in the state it’s in. Questions like:
- Why do social care workers receive the pay they do?
- Why do people face delays in being discharged from hospital?
- Why aren’t there more good services, like Carr Gomm’s, which support people in their own homes?
Our Deputy Chief Executive, Andrew Thomson, answers these questions in this short video explainer:
Transcript
When researching our health and social care system, Darren McGarvey compared it to an impossible relay race with the athletes having to tackle obstacles whilst desperately trying not to drop the baton. We’re regularly hearing that social care is in crisis, but that was not what Darren found when he spent the day with Tiffany and Alison in Dunoon.
He found highly skilled professionals supporting people to live their best lives. He observed the joy that Tiffany and Alison had in their work, and he commented that they’re underpaid for the importance of their role. They absolutely are.
Social care professionals throughout Scotland have their wages set and funded by the Scottish Government and thereafter paid via statutory contracts. Social care charities like Carr Gomm strive to do more to pay more. We continually lobby for more. But it is our system that undervalues and underpays social care professionals.
If the system set higher wages, then this would definitely help recruit and retain more good people. But I do not believe this would make the relay race any easier to finish. Huge contractual obstacles are still in our path.
When someone is ready to be discharged from hospital and they’re assessed as needing social care support in their own home, then a worker must be available immediately. But safely recruiting and comprehensively inducting a new worker takes several weeks, a clear mismatch in time scale. The only way to have a worker available immediately is to have a spare worker or spare workers on standby. But social care providers are not paid to have anyone spare or on standby.
The standard model of statutory social care contracts is to pay providers for the precise time that they are providing support in someone’s home and not a penny more. So, when workers like Alison and Tiffany leave someone’s house and get into their car to travel across town to the next person’s home, the local authority stops paying for their service. In Darren’s relay race analogy, I believe this is one of the greatest obstacles facing all of the athletes and their coaching teams.
In effect, many statutory commissioners have turned social care contracts into a zero-hours gig economy. Can you imagine if we applied this system logic elsewhere in public services? If we didn’t fund Fire Brigades whilst firefighters are racing to an emergency. Or if we only paid midwives when they’re delivering a baby? It would be ridiculous. And yet that is precisely how our social care system operates today. Darren McGarvey met exceptional people like Tiffany and Allison, undertaking skilled and professional roles and aspiring to have the greatest impact in the lives of people, families and communities throughout the UK. Our social care system must improve because this is a system that affects you and me, our families and friends. The social care system affects us all eventually.
Carr Gomm believes the social care system needs better resourcing to ensure that everyone can experience person-centred support which enables them to live their best possible life. Find out more about how we’re influencing change on our website.
