News

Community care: chartering the way ahead

A community care charter should be established to assess the new policy from the point of view of the user, says the parliamentary health committee.

The committee consulted many voluntary and statutory services in preparing its report and found that the main concern of organisations representing users and carers was quality of life as opposed to managers’ concerns about the efficiency of the system.

If carers’ and users’ quality of life was to be at the heart of community care then ‘this suggests the need for a basic minimum of service which users and carers can expect and are entitled to’.

Key areas which need attention include information about services available, accountability of services, information on costs of services, assurances that users and carers will be consulted in all phases of implementation and discussion of how much choice users and carers can exercise in the services they use.

Access to housing and transport were emphasised since they were found to have been largely ignored until now. As Age Concern said: ‘Helping people to remain in their own homes for as long as possible is meaningless if they are trapped there and isolated for lack of the means to participate in community life’.

Transport and housing should form part of a co-ordinated approach to services including education, employment, leisure and social services. Local authorities and the new Community Care Support Force should work together to ensure services are adequate.

The committee reported several complaints from users’ and carers’ organisations saying that there had been inadequate consultation until now with those on the receiving end of community care changes. CHAR, the housing campaign for single people, commented: ‘There has been very little attempt to consult the group we are concerned about at all. Even consulting the agencies and working with them, which has now been started... has happened very late on the whole.’