Highland Council and NHS Highland fear “potential collapse” of care home sector
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Highland Council says neither it nor NHS Highland are able to find more cash for care homes and when services are lost, it is unable to replace them.
It has also highlighted problems around recruiting and retaining staff, resulting in high use of agency staff, and high costs for doing so.
A series of “ongoing short notice closures” of care homes and “insufficient capacity to relocate residents” when there are closures only make matters worse while savings are nearly impossible due to the “nature of rural demand” which affects profitability.
An emergency meeting of the council and health board joint monitoring committee is to be held in November to identify possible solutions.
Council officers said: “Significant and accelerated redesign is required as the current approach is no longer viable or affordable.”
Measures identified by the committee will be reported on to the council in December.
“Staff and partners have targeted extensive time to come together to produce a strategic redesign plan for adult social care.
“As this is such a serious matter, an update via the extraordinary joint monitoring committee in November will be reported back to council in December.”
But no help should be expected from the Scottish Government, according to Deputy First Minister John Swinney in a letter to the Convention of Scottish Local Authorities (Cosla) in response to a call to utilise reserves.
In it, he said: “A number of comments have been made stating the Scottish Government should utilise the funding in its reserves. I do not recognise the numbers being discussed, as the Scottish Government has used reserves in full to deliver the 2022/23 budget.
“Indeed, the additional
£120 million provided to local government at stage two of the 2022/23 budget was delivered through the use of the Scotland reserve.
“Given that, and now the offer of a further £140 million to support a pay deal, any suggestion that we have not fully utilised all avenues open to us to provide additional funding to councils is wholly unfounded.”
