More Welsh care homes needed
There is an urgent need to build more new care homes in Powys to cater for the boom in the over 85 population a social care leader has said.
Mario Kreft MBE, the chair of Care Forum Wales, said the number of care homes is declining in the area instead of going up, a situation he describes as the perfect storm.
Mr Kreft spoke out after a new report, A Place to Call Home: Impact & Analysis, by Older People’s Commissioner Sarah Rochira highlighted the lack of care home capacity in Wales.
It follows on from a recent Parliamentary Review which contained a similar concern.
Mr Kreft said: “The message is loud, clear and very straightforward. We need to be building more care homes. Unfortunately, the opposite is happening and we are seeing care homes closing right across Powys because it is not financially viable to keep them open.
“Given the inescapable demographics of an ageing population, we are sitting on a social care timebomb.
“I think Sarah Rochira’s report is a real wake up call. It shows that we really do need to look at the leadership here in Wales of how we can actually develop a climate and culture where people want to invest and take the risk and actually build these much needed facilities.
“It is very, very clear that after two decades of people in local government particularly saying we don’t want new care homes, we’ve now had the Parliamentary Review and the Commissioner for Older People saying they’re desperately needed as we’re losing them faster than we’re building them.
“Just before Christmas we had, based on the Office of National Statistics, a report saying that the over 85s population in Wales is going to double in the next 15 - 18 years.
“It is imperative that we create a climate to reverse the decline in the number of care homes and get people building them again. The sector is chronically underfunded so this needs to be addressed as a matter of urgency.
“Unless more care homes are built, a lot of these older people are going to end up in hospital where there’s no room for them anyway."
“We’ve got to look at what these very influential reports have said about capacity, about workforce planning, about sustainability and we’ve got to change the culture.
"We’ve got to celebrate the independent sector and encourage people to invest. It is not happening now because the sums do not add up and if we can’t have a vibrant care sector In Wales, the knock on effects for our services and indeed, for the people of Wales are going to be very, very serious indeed.”
