Official Report search · Parliament Workbench

Chamber

Plenary, 18 May 2000

18 May 2000 · S1 · Plenary

Item of business

Community Care

Scanlon, Mary Con Highlands and Islands Watch on SPTV

The beds are certainly blocked. My information is based on submissions to the Health and Community Care Committee. One solution is to have one unified budget to deliver seamless, effective and appropriate health care. That would overcome the current two-tier system of community care, in which those who are self-funding are placed instantly and those who depend on social work wait for months or years. Neither can it be right that a social worker can override a consultant geriatrician's decision about where an individual should go for care. That point also was made to the committee.

We must also address another matter that was raised with the Health and Community Care Committee. Both the Accounts Commission and the Scottish Affairs Select Committee identified £166 million being spent on resource transfer, yet it is not clear how or where that money is spent. If we are to move forward, there must be transparency and accountability.

The Scottish Association for Mental Health stated:

"It is beyond dispute that mental health spending is not keeping up with general health service spending, despite the fact that mental health has been declared a priority."

Funding for mental health associations has gone down from £40,000 to £10,000 in the past three years. I was pleased to hear the minister say this morning that the framework for mental health, which is now two and a half years old, is beginning to make some progress, because a month ago SAMH was at the Health and Community Care Committee and said that no progress had been made on it. It said that too much time was being spent in long meetings between health and social work, that there were lots of strategy documents and that nothing much was appearing in front-line services.

Can it be right that, in 2000, mental health has a bed requirement of more than 100 per cent, with the result that, at the weekend, we have people with acute mental states taking over the beds of patients who are going out with weekend passes? That is the information we received from SAMH at the Health and Community Care Committee.

I have received other correspondence on community care. The Western Isles community care forum hardly commends the Executive's approach to community care. In an e-mail yesterday it stated:

"There are elderly, very elderly and infirm people living in their isolated houses, with no relatives or neighbours to help them, who receive half an hour's help in the morning for fire-lighting, half an hour in the evening and no attendance during the weekend. "

It would hardly support the Executive's community care strategy in Ballachulish, where a community councillor returned home one day to find two elderly people sitting in his living room. They thought it was their home. That hardly gives us confidence in the assessments for community care.

The motion's commendation of the Executive's approach will ring hollow throughout Scotland. A letter I received yesterday from a care home in Nairn stated:

"Unless this deplorable situation is addressed as a matter of urgency, care in this community will have reached an even greater state of crisis come the heavy demand on services during the winter months."

People all over Scotland feel that they are letting down their old folks and their own people. They write to me that they feel guilty that they are letting down their mothers, fathers and grandmothers. Those people's guilt should be ministers' guilt.

I ask ministers to bridge the chasm between their spin and reality; not to assume that a glossy brochure equals success; and, for once in their lives, to accept the responsibility of their position and put patients, carers, and their families at the heart of the health service.

I move amendment S1M-868.2, to leave out from "commends" to end and insert:

"notes that the Scottish Executive's approach to community care has resulted in a 40% increase in blocked beds in acute hospitals since 1997, to a total of 2,400 in the latest delayed discharge census, and that this costs the NHS in Scotland up to £96 million per year compared with the cost of nursing home places; further notes that many local authorities across Scotland have been forced to reduce services and increase costs for community care clients as a direct result of the Executive's latest local government financial settlement; further notes that many nursing and residential homes are facing severe financial pressure, due to decisions by councils to freeze fees for social work funded places despite cost increases; calls upon the Scottish Executive to unify health and social work budgets within Community Health Trusts involving NHS community services, social work services, the voluntary sector and the private sector; and believes that NHS resources wasted on blocked beds should be transferred to Health Trusts in order to provide more community care places and to deliver seamless and more effective community care services for clients."

Search Hansard contributions

Plenary, 18 May 2000

In the same item of business