Opportunity for consensus on social care reform
Governing Body Fellow Mary Daly has written a short opinion piece for the BMJ on the setting up of an independent commission on social care in England led by crossbench peer Louise Casey. She writes:
‘Everyone would agree that social care is beset by problems. The system is organisationally too complex with many structural weaknesses, including lack of confluence with the NHS, fragmentation in service provision, and a heavy reliance on market based providers.
‘In this context I agree that social care cannot afford to wait but suggest that the necessary change must be profound and that the commission can be justified as a way of proceeding. The organisational and funding issues are substantial, but we must recognise that reform in complex situations such as this will be successful only if it is based on achieving consensus about the nature of the problem and securing the political momentum to tackle it.
‘The Casey commission must produce a design for a sustainable, fair, and equitable social care system and do so in a way that puts the “social” back into social care.’
Professor Mary Daly is a Governing Body Fellow of Green Templeton College and Professor of Sociology and Social Policy at the Department of Social Policy and Intervention, University of Oxford. Mary is lead among college fellows on the Care Initiative that was set up at Green Templeton in 2013. Its mission is to be a forum in Oxford that, through informed debate and research, advances and shares knowledge about the complex issues involved in the care of older persons.
The Initiative has been funded and supported by Green Templeton since its inception. Its mission is rooted in the college’s engagement with, and commitment, to human welfare as a foundational college interest and common concern. The Initiative’s membership also reflects the diverse disciplinary orientations of the college, drawing together scholars and students especially from medical sciences, social sciences, and business and management programmes at Oxford and beyond.
