NHS plan looks incomplete without social care green paper
0The long-term plan published by NHS England on 7 January sets out how the extra £20.5bn previously promised for the health service in June will be spent over the next ten years.
It pledges £4.5bn to be spent on primary and community health services, and promises to support the integration of the health and social care budgets, though detail on how this is to be achieved is lacking.
Part of this increase for primary care is due to a focus in the plan on prevention, to try to ease demand on health services in general and, in particular, to cut hospital admissions.
This emphasis on primary care and the acknowledgement of the importance of social care reflect how the two are closely related.
The NHS is frequently called upon to pick up the pieces from underfunded and means-tested social care, and so the plan’s exclusive focus on the health service makes little economic sense, its critics allege.
Ian Hudspeth,chair of the LGA’s community wellbeing board, said: “we feel this is a missed opportunity for the government to also launch its long-awaited adult social care green paper and proposals for the sustainable funding of these services”.
Dr Eleanor Roy, CIPFA policy manager health and social care said: “The missing ingredient to this is, of course, the lack of a long term sustainable funding solution for social care.
“With predicted overspends in adult social care budgets of £136m in 2018-19 and further savings of £700m to be found, the long-term plan’s underlying assumption that social care will not impose any additional pressure on the NHS over the next five years may be overly optimistic in the absence of a longer term solution”.
