What is it about?
Every year, the Government invests the majority of its budget into the NHS and yet more and more people become 'stuck' in hospital when they are clinically ready to be discharged back home. This paper questions whether we could invest public money differently, so that more people can lead better lives in their own homes.
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Why is it important?
In the year to March 2023, over 660,000 days were spent in hospitals in Scotland by people whose discharge was delayed, costing around £200 million. We tend to consider this problem from a clinical perspective: greater investment in the health service is assumed to be the solution. The real answer lies in our under-funded and systematically broken social care system. This paper explores two of the system failures and proposes thoughtful solutions: investing our scarce public service resources differently to improve people's lives.
Perspectives
I believe that the current social care system is designed to work against us and that is simply not acceptable. We have been caught in world of fundamentalist public sector procurement that understands the costs of everything and the value of nothing. This has resulted in a broken social care system in which statutory contracts actively create a zero-hours gig economy for social care providers: a nonsensical system that guarantees delayed discharge from hospital. We simply must invest our scarce public service resources differently to improve people's lives.
Andrew Thomson
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Should We Defund the National Health Service?, British Journal of Hospital Medicine, August 2024, Mark Allen Group,
DOI: 10.12968/hmed.2024.0140.
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