Redesigning Health and Social Care

I’m looking forward to seeing what Gerry Robinson has to say about dementia care in the UK. From the recent reports on the quality of care in residential homes it would seem that there are many factors which influence this. Funding is an important issue but so to are the skills, values and understanding of the staff who have to do this challenging work. The Open University course Adult Health, Social Care and Wellbeing that we are preparing for October 2010 looks at many of the issues which face practitioners when providing care for vulnerable clients. It will be interesting to see how many of the issues we have covered in this course are raised in these two BBC programmes.

A few weeks ago, it was announced that from 2013, all new nurses will need a university degree.  There followed a gasp of horror from many pundits who predicted disastrous consequences for the quality of care.  The cartoon on the cover of The Week conveyed many fears– a prim nurse, little nose in the air and officiously ignoring her patients was presented with the caption “too clever to care.” Degree educated nurses will be less willing to do basic tasks and therefore care will suffer.  A hole where care should be will be created in the ward.

There is much to debate about the role of nurses and the structure of their education (for example, how much of it will continue to be practice-based?).  But what also needs to be recognised is the way in which the health care assistants who do provide much care, are rendered invisible and presented as inadequate in such debates even though they are often trained and highly experienced.  The health care assistants’ role and abilities must be part of the debate on care rather than presented as a hole in the ward.