Waiting…for change.
- ronnierennoldson
- Jul 31
- 2 min read
Andy Burnham’s recent announcement that his government will ‘fix’ social care services is welcome news, but I fear is just more bad news for those in design and construction.
He commented that ‘A failure to tackle the broken social care system has piled pressure on NHS services with thousands of people stuck in hospital beds despite being medically fit to leave, some of which are due to a lack of capacity of adult social care services.’*
This in turn has led to heightened pressure on hospital capacity, leading to many people experiencing corridor care caused by discharge delays. (It is estimated that cuts to social care funding between 2010 and 2018 led to an additional half a million A&E attendances a year for people aged 65 and over from 3.3million in 2011/12 to 5.8 million in 2024/25.)*
His Social care reform plan confirms an immediate focus on lifting up the social care workforce, integrating it with the NHS workforce, creating routes for progression, better pay, training and job security; creating a National Care Service.
The plan also requires that the service is fully and sustainably funded and Mr Burham has stated that he said he wants to extract more from existing budgets to fund the reforms, that there was "a significant amount of money in the system - it's just sometime it is not in the right place", but he hasn’t ruled out tax increases.
This is great news for those involved in the provision of this fully integrated service and probably better for those using the service , however, the last ten years of healthcare provision has been blighted by delay with many of the large PFI projects reviewed and then pushed into the ProCure framework and while the ProCure framework is currently being re-tendered, delaying the process or limiting the commitment to new build construction seems like the probable way that the ‘significant amount of money ’that’s already in the system’ can be restructured to pay for the new National Care service.
While I really hope that this badly needed service model is fully implemented and achieves the change required, the need to see progress before the next General election will inevitably lead to others footing the bill, and while the NHS estate still needs significant improvement I foresee that many talented designers will be forced out of healthcare; just when we need the brightest and best of them to help improve the healthcare service that is offered to us.
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