Health, Care & the NHS
Save our A&E
Danny Chambers is fighting the plan to stop vital NHS services leaving Winchester.
7 Dec 2023
As of February 2023
Health and social care
The National Health Service (NHS) and its staff, as well as the millions of carers in the UK, need greater and better support
Key Policies
- Raise the Carer's Allowance by £1,000 and give carers paid breaks. Millions of us support others full-time with too little support.
- Shift the healthcare system to provide more preventive medicine so we can recognise and tackle health issues early on
- Invest more in the NHS through a ring-fenced rise of 1p on income tax, providing £7bn in additional funds
- Reform social care using long-established plans as the startpoint for improvement
- Recruit and train more doctors and GPs to fill vacancies in the NHS and cut waiting times
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The National Health Service (NHS) is something that Britain is justifiably proud of, but it is also a system that has been pushed to breaking point and is in desperate need of support and careful change to ensure it can properly serve those with health issues.
The issue of social care is something that has been ignored by too long and its knock-on impacts now threaten to overwhelm an already challenged health service.
We need to rethink how we do healthcare in the UK, putting more resources into preventative medicine and providing more support to the millions of carers across the country that independently maintain the nation's health. And we need to make sure that we are able to fill the vacancies that already exist in the NHS.
Solutions
We have a range of plans to improve this nation's health:
Carers
- Increase the Carer's Allowance by £1,000 a year. There are over 11 million unpaid carers in the UK who look after family or friends, without whom the healthcare system would be overwhelmed and for which the cost would be ruinous. If you take care of someone full-time and they are registered as disabled, you can receive up to £3,600 a year in Carer's Allowance. It's not much. Without carers, it is estimated that the government would end up paying nearly five times as much - over £16,500 per carer - for healthcare. A small uplift in the Carer's Allowance would make a huge difference to millions of citizens.
- Provide full-time carers with paid time off. It's a standard part of all other workers' lives but carers don't get paid time off, leaving them worse off and unable to recharge their batteries.
- Reform the social care system starting with recommendations developed back in 2011 designed to ensure people don't have to sell their homes to pay for care.
Economist Andrew Dilnot was asked to look at the issue of social care by the LibDem-Conservative coalition and in 2011 the Dilnot Commission published its report with several recommendations.
Key among them was that there should be a cap of £35,000 on how much someone has to pay for their adult social care costs. It also recommended that people should be allowed to have savings of £100,000 before support is withdrawn, quadrupling the current £23,250 theshold.
Both recommendations were designed to tackle the unpleasant reality that more and more people have to sell their homes to pay for their care, leaving them stranded and struggling financially at their most vulnerable time of life. The government would fund local authorities to cover the cost.
Despite more than a decade of acknowledging social care as a growing problem, implementation of the Dilnot recommendations has still not happened. The £35,000 cap was quickly increased to £75,000, but citing financial pressures, first prime minister David Cameron and then Theresa May refused to introduce it. After years of pressure, the Conservative government under Boris Johnson said it would introduce the cap at an increased cap of £86,000 but then under Rishi Sunak, the government backtracked again saying it wouldn't be implemented for another two years, pushing it back to November 2024. The savings level is still set at £23,250 more than a decade after Dilnot recommended raising it.
The ongoing failure to act is “a stain on us as a nation", Andrew Dilnot has said.
More recently, the collapse of the social care system has led to crippling delays in ambulance times and accident and emergency appointments because patients have no beds to be discharged to outside a hospital, causing backlogs. |
The NHS
- Shift the healthcare system to provide more preventive medicine. The current system waits until people are unwell before treating them, causing greater suffering, extra pressure and additional costs. If we can recognise and tackle health issues early on, pressure can be lifted on the rest of the NHS
- Invest more in the NHS through a ring-fenced rise of 1p on income tax. That would provide £7bn in additional funds that could then be used for much-needed improvements
- Recruit and train more doctors and GPs to fill vacancies in the NHS and cut waiting times. There are currently 100,000 vacancies in the NHS and a backlog of several million patients waiting for treatment.
- Put mental health on an equal footing to physical health. It's important to recognise that someone's mental health is just as important as their physical health; until it is treated as such, the health service will continue to struggle.