What we need is a national social care service

What we need is a national social care service A centralised, free-at-the-point-of-use NHS and council-run, means-tested social care aren’t working together – and patients are paying the price

Neil Kinnock was on the radio at the weekend, talking about his hero Aneurin Bevan with the journalist Matthew Parris and one of Bevan’s biographers, John Campbell. Any conversation about Bevan’s life is mostly about the NHS and so it was this time, too. But it was a useful reminder of how, among all the battles fought over its creation, among the fiercest was the question of replacing a patchwork of local provision with a single centralised structure that tried to guarantee that everyone got the same level of care wherever they lived. At that the point the radical, big-government approach petered out. Social care was left where it always had been, with local councils.

Councils argue that keeping older people well is about much more than care homes and clearing hospital beds Continue reading... The Guardian