News

Growing old in private

The government has not yet begun to consider seriously the long-term healthcare effects of the projected increase in over 85-year-olds, according to a recently published report by the Association of the British Pharmaceutical Industry.

The report, The challenges of ageing, states that by 2036, 21 per cent of the population will be over 65. It argues that the main funding problem will be one of community care, expected to rise by 17 per cent in the next decade. As long stay geriatric and psychogeriatric wards are closed down, this is increasingly being provided by private nursing homes.

The report predicts: ‘It is quite possible that most, if not all, NHS long-stay provision will have been transferred, formally or informally, to local authority budgets or personal expenditure by the end of the decade.

’The commitment in the new GP contract to giving people over 75 an annual check-up and home visit is praised by the report, but it notes the absence of specific references to the elderly in the recent green paper The health of the nation. It calls this ‘indicative of a persisting low level of interest in the special health problems of older people’.

According to the report, private nursing homes are now the main provider for long-term care of the elderly. The government has encouraged this trend by financially penalising those local authorities which make heavier use of their own homes. The report states: ‘To a very large extent now, and increasingly in the future, people will have to envisage exhausting their own resources before becoming eligible for state funding.

As with prescription charges, those living just above the poverty level will have most to lose in this system.