You can download from here my resource document, which looks at the Green Paper in some detail, and a paper assessing some of the media coverage.

I think the Green Paper’s focus on paying for older people’s care represents a failure to focus on what we can do about the quality of many different aspects of the care system, because how it feels to people and how human it is in its reaction to the human problems that families face is far more important than the costs. People would be more prepared to pay for a system that felt like good quality.

I also think it misses a trick on social work. In the transformation agenda social workers are supposed to stop managing people’s care for them but advocate for and support them in making their own decisions. It would be good to make clear, then, that social workers will be helping people through these difficult funding issues, as they do now.

I think the government’s focus on costs, which will take years to do something about, and has been avoided for years, also misleads the press, with some honourable exceptions, into ‘tax on the middle classes’ rants, which misleads their readers into anger about the wrong things. We really do need to think seriously about care of older people.

There is little about palliative and end of life care, because the document and the reaction really does not make clear that part of the trouble is that we are looking at care for people who are dying. Not dying in the palliative care sense, but they are at the end of their lives. We need to focus on this more.

Click to download:

Social care green paper

Press reaction to the social care Green Paper