planned spending on the NHS will not be cut, and adult social care will receive more funding, but many areas of funding for councils will be reduced severely and no one expects that this will not have a knock-on effect on adult social services. For some detail, see this assessment from Community Care and this from Inside Housing, about Supporting People funding.
Telecare Aware readers employed by councils or in companies dependent on council and NHS spending who are not focusing today on whether they will still have a job next year may be thinking about the threats and opportunities these radical financial changes may bring for telecare and telehealth. These apply on many levels from the strategic to the personal.
The obvious threat is that spending on telecare and telehealth will decline because they are not yet seen to be the core and cost-saving services that they ‘should’ be seen as. The corresponding opportunity is that services will wake up to the beneficial effects of such spending and invest in them more.
On another level, optimists could expect staff reductions to remove ‘laggards’ from the system leaving councils and the NHS (yes, the knock-on effect of the cuts will affect the NHS) more dynamic and pro-change. Unfortunately, experience suggests that when job reductions loom it is the more switched-on staff who jump ship first, leaving the less able to manage as best they can. So that’s a threat…but also an opportunity for companies which can offer a managed telecare or telehealth service – provided they can really deliver them, of course.
Well, there are lots of other threat/opportunity angles… perhaps readers would like to add their own views in comments. [By the way, I strongly suggest you compose your comment in some other program, such as Notepad, and paste it into the comment box as we are having some technical problems with the commenting system that I have not yet been able to resolve. You may need to post your comment again if you get an error message. Ed. Steve]
Cuts and Tele-care/health
The cuts in social care spending do present an opportunity for new ways of doing things, at lower cost. However, they also run the risk of new approaches, which require up-front funding to get started, being put on the back-burner until money is less tight. We will have to wait and see.
cuts and Telecare
I am inclined to agree with Gerry that the cuts represent an opportunity to take a good look at how AT can be used more effectively. However, it will also require a shift to consider it as a model of service delivery with system and processes that enable its effective delivery.