Social Care

Tackling isolation

Paul Gosling on December 13, 2023, 10:19 am

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Isolation and loneliness amongst older people are serious problems that worsened during the pandemic. While people are living longer, often this involves one partner surviving the other. Sometimes the result can be not only unhappiness, but also additional pressures on GPs and hospitals, as the person has nowhere else to turn. Loneliness has such far-reaching consequences that the health impact is comparable to smoking up to 15 cigarettes a day, according to one study, and is associated with an increased …

Italy’s social co-ops – a model for Northern Ireland to copy?

Paul Gosling on June 25, 2021, 9:04 am

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Social care provision is in crisis across much of the world. How can the quality of care be maintained or improved? How can it be made available to those who need it? And how can social care be carried out in an affordable way without underpaying or exploiting its workers? These questions are being asked in many countries and regions. Italy has come up with its own answer – social co-operatives – and its model is being copied across much …

“Most people believe social care should be free, but there’s a lot of confusion out there”

Paul Gosling on May 25, 2020, 9:02 am

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Social care must be reformed. If it wasn’t clear before the Covid-19 pandemic, it has become tragically obvious over recent weeks. So this is an opportune time to hear in the latest Holywell Trust Forward Together podcast from Deirdre Heenan, professor of social policy at Ulster University and joint author nine years ago of a major study into Northern Ireland’s health and social care system. “The vast majority of people accept and want the NHS to be free at the …

Andrew Dilnot offers a clever solution to a deeply embedded problem, but…

Mick Fealty on July 4, 2011, 6:16 pm

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One, it does not apply to Northern Ireland, and two the costs attached may prevent the current Lib Dem Conservative coalition from bring it in… So what’s the problem? In an unwieldly phrase: the under regulated economic burden of long term illness falling directly upon the personal estate of those affected. Emma Stone at the Rowntree Foundation which commissioned the report: The big surprise in today’s report is the extended means test for residential (not home-based) care. In 2007, JRF …