On 10 April 2005 the House of Commons Health Select Committee published a damning report about the government’s policy on fully funded NHS continuing care.
The report dramatically highlights the incoherence and discrimination of the government’s policy on assessing people with dementia for NHS continuing care and supports repeated calls made by the Alzheimer’s Society and other charities for the introduction of national criteria and a standard method of assessment, backed up by a national training programme.
The Alzheimer’s Society gave evidence to the Committee using the experience which people with dementia and carers have told us about. In the evidence session MPs mentioned having spoken to people affected by dementia at the Alzheimer’s Society Parliamentary lobby on 16 March.
The report demands a fresh rethink about the artificial barrier between health and social care which means that people with dementia are charged for care. The report states:
… people who in the past would have been cared for in NHS long stay wards and now often accommodated in nursing homes. This means that responsibility for funding long term care has to a major extent been shunted from the NHS to local authorities and individual patients and their families.
Debates about where the boundary between health and social care should be drawn have been complicated by further debates around the definitions of ‘personal care’ and ‘nursing care’, and have lead to the absurd position where carers providing complex medical support for their loved ones are denied fully funded continuing care home because they are not registered nurses.
Our evidence indicates that current eligibility criteria for NHS continuing care are heavily weighted towards physical needs, to the detriment of mental health and psychological needs. It strikes us as perverse that, under the current criteria, in the case of Alzheimer's disease the further a person’s illness progresses, the less likely they are to qualify for continuing care funding, even though they in fact the need more intensive health care to maintain a good quality of life.
… we dispute the Minister's argument that funding personal care would be financially unsustainable… we maintain that with political will, the resources could be found to fund free personal care.