RESPITE services for carers in the Edinburgh area are "well below the Scottish average and declining" according to a damning report on elderly care in the capital which also warned that staff shortages meant older people were being left to deteriorate before they qualified for help.
Inspectors rated health and social care services across Edinburgh as either "weak" or "unsatisfactory" in five out of nine quality indicators, with the remaining four categories found to be "adequate".
Delayed discharges from hospital for patients over-65 were "substantially poorer than the national average" due to a shortage of care home places or home care provision, with spending on emergency admissions for the same age group also higher than average.
The report by the Care Inspectorate and Healthcare improvement Scotland is the first time the performance of the new Edinburgh Health and Social Care Partnership - formed by NHS Lothian and Edinburgh City Council - has been reviewed.
Inspectors found that respite provision for older people and their carers was "well below the Scotland average and declining". Relatives needing a break from caring had to book respite "many months beforehand" and emergency respite was "particularly hard to find". The report added that older people were sometimes "admitted to hospital as a ‘social admission’ because their
carers had been hospitalised" and there was no provision to offer them care at home.
The report stressed that while the care services delivered in Edinburgh were "generally of a good quality", many older people and carers "were unable to get help unless their needs were critical".
Inspectors said the partnership had ploughed "substantial funds" into maintaining and expanding existing services "at the expense of investment in early intervention".
They wrote: "A serious concern was the difficulty experienced by older people in getting services before their conditions had deteriorated. Most frontline staff told us they could deal only with the most urgent cases and were unable to give attention to preventative work through early intervention. Priority had to be given to older people needing to be discharged from hospital, which meant people in the community missing out or having to wait much longer for services to meet their needs."
However, the report acknowledged that the timing of the inspection - from October to December 2016 - coincided with a "period of significant transformation" for the partnership.
Inspectors have made 17 recommendations for improvement.
Robbie Pearson, chief executive of Healthcare Improvement Scotland said: “Although the partnership achieved good outcomes for some older people and their carers, too many people had poor experiences and poor outcomes.
“The partnership needs to strengthen care at home. Our inspectors found examples of older people being admitted to hospital because their carer was unable to continue caring, when they could have been supported to stay living at home."
Rob McCulloch-Graham, chief officer of Edinburgh HSCP, said the partnership had already taken "significant steps" to improve.
He added: “After the preliminary inspection results, we established an improvement team which has already produced positive results, almost halving the number of people waiting for care within their homes and reducing hospital waiting times by around 20 per cent.
“This report pulls no punches and there are clear lessons to be learned – however, the inspection was carried out before we implemented a long-term reorganisation of care and we were pleased to note that staff remain positive and committed to the important work they are doing.”
Why are you making commenting on The Herald only available to subscribers?
It should have been a safe space for informed debate, somewhere for readers to discuss issues around the biggest stories of the day, but all too often the below the line comments on most websites have become bogged down by off-topic discussions and abuse.
heraldscotland.com is tackling this problem by allowing only subscribers to comment.
We are doing this to improve the experience for our loyal readers and we believe it will reduce the ability of trolls and troublemakers, who occasionally find their way onto our site, to abuse our journalists and readers. We also hope it will help the comments section fulfil its promise as a part of Scotland's conversation with itself.
We are lucky at The Herald. We are read by an informed, educated readership who can add their knowledge and insights to our stories.
That is invaluable.
We are making the subscriber-only change to support our valued readers, who tell us they don't want the site cluttered up with irrelevant comments, untruths and abuse.
In the past, the journalist’s job was to collect and distribute information to the audience. Technology means that readers can shape a discussion. We look forward to hearing from you on heraldscotland.com
Comments & Moderation
Readers’ comments: You are personally liable for the content of any comments you upload to this website, so please act responsibly. We do not pre-moderate or monitor readers’ comments appearing on our websites, but we do post-moderate in response to complaints we receive or otherwise when a potential problem comes to our attention. You can make a complaint by using the ‘report this post’ link . We may then apply our discretion under the user terms to amend or delete comments.
Post moderation is undertaken full-time 9am-6pm on weekdays, and on a part-time basis outwith those hours.
Read the rules hereLast Updated:
Report this comment Cancel