Council tax hike being considered to cover social care costs

Ministers are looking at increasing council tax to pay for social care but have been warned that it will not tackle funding problems which are “out of control”.

Experts, including the former Tory health secretary Stephen Dorrell, have warned of a growing cash crisis hitting local government and the NHS.

The government is preparing to allow tax precepts to be increased so local councils, which have suffered reductions in government grants totalling more than 40% since 2010, can claw in extra cash to cover the spiralling social care costs.

Izzi Seccombe, the Conservative chair of the Local Goverment Association’s community wellbeing board, confirmed that the idea of an increase in the precept was being considered.

“We have had some dialogue with ministers about this,” she told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme on Monday.

But she said the money raised from such a move would not be enough. Seccombe pointed out a 2% increase in precept imposed by most councils last year raised only £380m, which was not enough to pay the £600m needed to cover increased staff costs under the “national living wage”.

She also warned that a rise in council tax would create a postcode lottery in services because richer areas could raise more than poorer areas where the need is greatest.

Seccombe called for emergency funding. “We need an injection now of £1.3bn because there is a shortfall by the end of 2020 of £2.6bn.”

Dorrell, who is now the chair of the NHS Confederation, said the shortfall in social care was spilling over into the NHS because discharged hospital patients had nowhere else to go.

He said: “What we are talking about is a cash shortage that is threatening the stability not just of local government but of the National Health Service. Unless we address this seriously, we will simply see a failure of service across the range of local public services and people will suffer as a consequence.

“It comes when people find they can’t have access to care homes, so they end up in A&E and GP surgeries. They can’t be discharged from hospital when they are fit and ready to go.”

Dorrell said he would welcome giving councils the flexibility to raise council tax for social care, but he called for a more “fundamental” rethink of both health and social care funding.

Martin Green, the chief executive of Care England, which represents care home providers, said hundreds of providers were on the brink of financial ruin.

He said: “Research recently showed 40% of care services will no longer be viable in the medium term so this is a huge number of care services that will be lost.

“The government needs to have a clear strategy on social care and if they don’t there will be a crisis right across both health and social care.”

Andrea Sutcliffe, the chief inspector for adult social care, told the Times: “The system is approaching a tipping point. We’ve got increased demand and potentially a restriction on capacity.

“Unless we really get to grips with some of these problems … we will get to an absolute crisis.”

Labour peer David Lipsey, who was involved in a royal commission on elderly care funding in the 1990s, added: “There could be mass closures of care homes.

“There’s a danger that poor people in poor areas will end up without care, living a squalid life. There could be care blackspots because the homes that are reliant on state funding will become unsustainable,” said Lord Lipsey.

The Lib Dem shadow secretary of state for health, Norman Lamb, said: “This is dreadful crisis management from the Conservatives.

“They are lurching from crisis to crisis and this is yet another desperate sticking plaster solution which falls short of what is needed. Making councils bear all the burden will increase the postcode lottery which already exists.

“It will mean that wealthy parts of the country will find it easier to meet rising demand whilst those areas where council tax raises less money will be left struggling.

“The government must be held to account for the consequences of leaving more and more people without the care they desperately need.”

Barbara Keeley, the shadow minister for social care, commenting on reports of proposed council tax rises to fund social care, said: “Asking taxpayers and councils to pick up the bill for the Tories’ failure is no substitute for a proper plan.

“It is time for Tory ministers to deal with the crisis they have created in funding social care and to develop a sustainable way of funding the social care on which vulnerable and frail older people depend.”

Council tax hike being considered to cover social care costs

Observe: paralysed man moves his hand using considered

An Ohio, US resident who was paralysed in a swimming accident has made history as the very first ever patient to move his injured hand making use of his personal ideas.

Ian Burkhart managed to pick up a spoon and open and near his initial right after doctors at The Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center, with researchers from Battelle, inserted a Neurobridge technology microchip into his brain.

The medical breakthrough provides hope to hundreds of thousands of accident victims and stroke sufferers of a new bionic era of motion by means of believed.

Source: Storyful / Ohio State University Wexner Healthcare Center

Observe: paralysed man moves his hand using considered

The Man Who Could not End: OCD, and the Correct Story of&nbspa&nbspLife&nbspLost in Considered overview

An Ethiopian schoolgirl named Bira, David Adam commences his story, after ate a wall of her house. “She didn’t want to, but she located that to eat the wall was the only way to cease her contemplating about it … By the time she was 17 years previous she had eaten eight square metres of the wall – far more than half a tonne of mud bricks.” She had parasites, constipation, a great deal of soreness and sores in her throat from all the swallowing. “In tears, she walked to her local hospital,” exactly where she identified one particular of her country’s “eight psychiatrists for a nation of 70 million people”, and asked for help.

You can see why a writer would want to start his book with this kind of a story. Lady eats property, it’s a brilliant picture, as grabbing as Oliver Sacks’s The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat. On the other hand, it raises a great deal of inquiries. When did this come about, what was the diagnosis and treatment method? How is Bira performing now? Is there something particularly Ethiopian about mud-eating, or to do with getting a girl, or a teenager? Was it anything smaller sized and far more particular about Bira?

Adam’s guide answers none of these inquiries, so I looked up the journal report from which he received the story, which was published in 2008. Consuming mud, I learned, is also named geophagia, and is the most typical manifestation of a difficulty known as pica, whereby folks consume factors not usually deemed edible. Pica, some think, is much more typical in men and women who “dwell in poverty” and/or the “hot tropics”. It can be connected with pregnancy, and/or iron or zinc deficiency, and/or sickle cell anaemia, and/or “neglect”.

Bira, even so, had not just presented with the pica, but also her obsession with the mud ahead of she ate it. Psychotherapy was indicated, and maybe, an SSRI antidepressant, but both have been too costly to be on offer. So Bira was handled with clomipramine, an older and less expensive tricyclic antidepressant. She got much better, then stopped the medicines and had a relapse, then at the time the article was submitted was believed to be back on them, and enjoying existence, and “reportedly symptom-cost-free”.

Such an interesting story, and yet Adam tells so minor of it. He also tends to make a curious blunder. Bira, the report says, did not eat “a wall of her property” but a wall described as either “at” or “in front of” her home. It is just not accurate to describe her as the lady who ate a wall of her property. What difference does this make to the story we began with, and how we study the rest of the guide that follows?

David Adam’s aims are superb. He desires people to cease speaking about obsessive-compulsive disorder as if it were only “a behaviour quirk”, and to comprehend it as the “mental torment” it can be to those who endure from it: it really is not uncommon for a compulsive hand-washer, for example, to drop as many as ten hrs a day on their problem – six of them in fretting and four of them at the sink. The book commences with a trenchant dedication: “For these who deserve an explanation”, and ends with tips from OCD-United kingdom on how to initiate a discussion with your medical doctor about a) obsessive thoughts in common and b) obsessive thoughts to do with wanting to hurt a child.

Adam, additionally, has a personal curiosity in the topic, getting had OCD himself for more than 20 years. His specific fear, he says, is that he could have “caught” Aids: from a tissue, a bus shelter, a toothbrush that a buddy could have borrowed in that youth hostel in France. In the early 1990s he pestered the National Aids Helpline so frequently that he had to fake his accent so they wouldn’t recognise him. He donated blood just so he’d get the HIV check, but threw away his free biscuit when he located out about the three-month time-lag between infection and antibodies becoming raised. He’s a lot greater now, with his “lifeline” sertraline each and every morning (clomipramine, he says, is “a beast … with nasty side-results” in contrast to Bira, he has accessibility to a overall health service that can afford SSRIs) and plenty of therapy. But “even on the medication and soon after CBT … for most men and women it is a bit like becoming a recovering alcoholic … I will most likely constantly have OCD.”

So what is OCD, exactly where does it come from and how does it get set off? Nicely, right here is the single most valuable truth I realized from this guide: OCD is entirely different from OCPD, obsessive- compulsive personality disorder, which is merely to be a person with an unusually low tolerance for mess and imperfection – joke-anal men and women, like Monica from Close friends. The need for buy and ritual in the lives of OCPD folks is “ego-syntonic”, odd and possibly anti-social, but basically element of who they are. In OCD folks, on the other hand, the thoughts are “harrowing, ego-dystonic”, in countless, exhausting conflict with the person’s other drives and hopes. It truly is like getting a phobia, but worse, in that you cannot steer clear of it just by steering clear of planes or spiders. The stimulus is internal. You create it oneself.

Is it then a memory issue, that you keep forgetting the switch was off the last time you tried it, not to mention the a lot of occasions before that? No, the situation isn’t with the quality of your recall, but with your self-confidence in its accuracy, which will get totally misplaced. And then, when you check out it, your self confidence drops further, so you examine again, and once more, and so on, in a vicious cycle. Psychologists, Adam writes, get in touch with this kind of thing the “white-bear effect”, following the initiation rite the youthful Tolstoy imposed for membership of his secret society – all you had to do was stand in the corner and not believe about a white bear, and “the cursed thing comes to mind every single minute,” as Dostoevsky wrote in Winter Notes on Summer time Impressions. Making an attempt not to consider about anything as soon as you have started is like “hold(ing) back an avalanche by melting the snow with a candle,” as Adam puts it. “It just keeps coming and coming.”

A general-audience book about this distressing and debilitating condition is obviously an superb thing to have, and Adam is a punchy author. But I do not think he assists himself in the way he tends to conceptualise the difficulty as basically mechanical, awaiting only the correct screwdriver and a spot of oil: “Think about a personal personal computer … That is how the thoughts typically handles ideas.” “The thoughts is a imagined factory.” “OCD happens when the thalamus runs out of management and sends inappropriate guidelines back to the orbito-frontal cortex … A single way to try to correct the brain is with medication.” To be fair, Adam is only following the current DSM-dominated psychiatric orthodoxy, the main function of which, as he acknowledges, is to get personal overall health insurers paying out normal fees for regular diagnoses. And his thinking does get much more vital and intriguing in direction of the finish: “Labels to some extent are just that, labels.” “The classes of the DSM do not … carve nature at the joints.”

A bigger criticism, nevertheless, will take us back to Bira and her mud-consuming. Why would you cite this kind of a story, but allow inaccuracy creep into its basic architecture? Not deliberately – Adam seems otherwise really scrupulous. Because you have an unconscious conflict, probably, amongst telling a great story and acquiring it fairly correct? Even the scant details offered by the original article’s authors suggest all kinds of subtleties to Bira’s story, but Adam, for whatever reason, doesn’t want to go there. And you can see that conflict at function also in even the short quotes I have given about his own Aids worry. “I do not worry HIV as it is now understood,” he explains, at one point, “a fragile, challenging-to-catch virus that prospects to an infection that is largely managed with medication … The HIV I concentrate on” – adding his “sincere apologies”, I am glad to say, to the people who truly have it – “is the ailment of the late 1980s … so significant that in 1986 it demanded the United kingdom government beam into our homes surprising tv adverts with crashing gravestones and the catchphrase ‘Aids: Will not Die of Ignorance’.”

His dread, in other phrases, would seem to be some kind of death-dread, related with blood and intercourse and other typical suspects, triggered maybe by his misfortune in possessing reached sexual maturity just as an emerging condition grew to become the focus for a huge moral panic. So Adam’s Aids concern, too, helps make most sense when looked at sensitively and symbolically, as a story. But that doesn’t seem to be the sort of story that he wants to tell.

The Man Who Could not End: OCD, and the Correct Story of&nbspa&nbspLife&nbspLost in Considered overview