Meeting of the Parliament 06 January 2016
Johann Lamont raises a valid point because there may be some people in care homes who should be at home. There are also some at home who should be in care homes.
I was glad to see that in the Government response, under recommendation 2, it talks about supporting people to live well
“at home or in a homely setting”.
I thought that that was quite a good way of putting it. The point has already been made—I think by Jenny Marra—that we are very dependent on volunteers, family members and the third sector. It is just not possible for the public sector to provide befriending and care for every single person in this country.
The other side, perhaps, to what we have just heard is that when I visited a care home in my constituency a little while ago, the staff said that, in effect, it was being used as a hospice by Glasgow City Council, with admission only taking place when the older person was towards the end of their life and was in too poor a state to really benefit from the care home setting.
Finances are clearly part of the whole equation, because being in a care home is not cheap. I strongly contend that we must live within our means, but I think that we are seeing cases where some older people are being kept at home for financial reasons and as a result they are isolated and are not in the most appropriate setting.
One of the visits that the committee carried out was to Easterhouse in the east end of Glasgow and the convener and I also went with the Food Train on visits to Shettleston and Dennistoun. We met an elderly couple who lived three storeys up and they were struggling a bit with walking up the stairs but they did not want to move—they wanted to stay where they were. The kind of support that Food Train provides is ideal and essential for keeping people in their homes.
As the name suggests, Food Train is primarily about buying and delivering shopping for people. That is absolutely great, but it struck me and the convener that the volunteers were also able to spend time with people as they delivered the shopping, which was very much appreciated by those people.
We have to accept that paid care workers are very much under pressure with multiple visits and perhaps cannot spend a lot of time befriending and chatting. However, Food Train and other befriending services can give more of that time that people need.
Housing has to be part of the answer to all this and a range of housing must be available. I still have too many people in my constituency coming to me who everyone agrees are in the wrong type of housing—for example, an older person who is up a close and cannot manage the stairs—yet there are very few ground-floor flats and sheltered or very-sheltered housing is just not available. The Finance Committee looked at that issue a little while ago.
I think that I am running out of time so I will cut out one or two bits from my speech.
We need to support all types of housing and we need to think about whether we should be investing more in housing generally or whether we should be making a more specialised investment in things such as sheltered and very-sheltered housing.
I think that we all learned from this study. In one sense, we all knew that isolation and loneliness existed but carrying out this study and reporting on it as we are today has underlined, for me at least, that it is not just a minor side issue; it is a real and serious issue that must remain firmly on our agenda.
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