LABOUR U-TURN ON CARE STANDARDS (13/08/02)

Conservatives this week welcomed a spectacular U-turn by the government on care standards regulations.
The government has backed down on petty regulations and prescriptive rules about things like the size of rooms and width of doors in care homes.
Everyone recognises the need for high standards of care for the elderly. However, the government’s new regulations were overly prescriptive and would have caused many more care homes to close.
In recent years many care homes have already closed down due to the impact of excessive government regulations. Since 1997, 2095 out of 14629 care homes have closed. This represents around 50,000 beds. Between 2000 and 2001 over 12,600 care home beds were lost. This equates to 250 every week.
A thriving care home sector is pivotal to the effectiveness of the overall healthcare system. It is not possible to increase hospital capacity unless care home capacity is also increased. Labour completely fails to grasp this. The loss of 50,000 beds since Labour took office has caused instances of delayed patient discharges (bed-blocking) to rise and led to thousands of cancelled operations.
Simon Burns, Shadow Health Minister, said:
“These regulations had little to do with the quality of care provided but did have a considerable impact of destroying thriving, loving care homes and ruined the lives of many elderly, frail, often confused people.”
“Our campaigning has forced the government to think again, admit that it was wrong and reverse this disastrous policy that has caused so much distress and misery for some of the most vulnerable members of society.”