Where have all the carers gone?

‘We have a new young doctor,’ said my friend Anne, and ‘he called this morning. He had his hair in a top knot kind of bun, and sat cross legged on the floor to talk to me and David.’ (I said it was a miracle that their doctor had visited when most of us have to wait weeks to speak to ours, even over the telephone.) The new doctor had called to see them because Anne is the carer for her husband David, now in his third year of living with dementia, and he wanted to check on how she was coping. Anne has serious ailments: she has a heart pacemaker and spinal stenosis and is in a permanent state of stressed fatigue. ‘You shouldn’t be the carer like this,’ said the young top-knotted doctor, ‘I’ll speak to Social Services about arranging more care.’ He was as good as his word, and Social Services telephoned Anne the next day. But only to say that they were sorry, they had no carers available. Not one. In desperation she telephoned a local domiciliary care Agency, and they said the same. Not one. Sadly she said, ‘How can it be right that the people who fought the last war so we could be free should be treated like this?’

Anne and David live in a fairly new (all age) apartment complex, and they get help from their friendly neighbours who help with shopping and other things. They’ve all given Anne their mobile phone numbers. But it’s the daily routine that is wearing her down: her hands tremble and getting her tall husband out of bed in the morning and showered and dressed is hard work. Putting a meal on the table and clearing away afterwards and the hundred and one things that make up the day are exhausting. It’s as though each day she and David traverse a swaying rope bridge slung between two high cliffs: one slip would see them crashing on the rocks below. They would do so well in one of our care homes, where the expertise and love and Christian atmosphere would be balm to their souls. But married for over 60 years, she doesn’t want them to be separated in different bedrooms.

Anne and David are only one of the tens of thousands of vulnerable people affected by the lack of carers. Many are ‘trapped’ in hospital beds, unable to return home because there is no-one to look after them. And numbers are growing. A report by ITV showed that ‘while we are going to need 480,000 extra people working in social care by 2035, we already have 165,000 vacancies every day and the 28% of the workforce aged 55 or over may retire in the next 10 years.’

The Government has failed on three key issues, says the latest report by the think-tank, the Nuffield Trust. Primarily, it has not put in place a sustainable long-term revenue stream to fund social care. Jane Townson, CEO of the Homecare Association, who used to run a care agency, states that central government funding is inadequate and carers are under-valued and underpaid. Sporadic injections of money bring relief in a crisis, but do little to enable long-term strategic reform.

Japan has the most ageing population in the world, and funds social care with a Long Term Care Insurance plan(LTCI) introduced in 2000. It’s a public programme that supports citizens aged 65 and above, and is funded by charging citizens 40 years and older a premium based on a percentage determined by their income. LTCI pays for residential, home and community-based services.

There is also a failure to address the underlying issues facing the care sector in a coordinated way, says the Nuffield Trust, and a lack of cross party collaboration. Jane Townsend said that ‘If the UK was a company the whole board would have been fired' Click here to read more

Fifty years ago, most older people were cared for by their families in their own homes, usually wives who stayed at home to raise their families and take care of their parents when the time came. But now women are incentivised to work with schemes like subsidised child-care, so that the Exchequer can benefit from their taxes. Now more of us are living to a great old age, but for the last two or three years of our lives most will need help. So the bell tolls not just for today’s older generation but for ours, too. I’ve mentioned before Sir Andrew Dilnott’s assertion that it’s not raised in Parliament because there isn’t enough about it in MPs’ mailboxes. We can change that by writing to our MPs – it doesn’t have to be long, but strongly to the point. This website will bring up your MP and his or her contact details - .