Lost and found

Here is an extract from my new blog for the Royal Society of Arts here

In the social care sector, we are currently all too aware of what we don’t have.

We still lack adequate protective clothing for workers doing the most important jobs.

We still lack people in key roles – like the social care workers who until a few weeks ago were ‘unskilled’, but are now the heroes we applaud from our doorsteps each week.

We still lack virus tests, which means we lack the knowledge we need to keep people safe. Individually, many of us lack money because people are losing paid work. We lack social contact, freedom, green spaces, hugs. (and pasta.)

The things we lack are causing hardship and hopelessness. We are also finding some things we didn’t realise we had.

We have new friendships, and support where we weren’t expecting it, as thousands of grassroots mutual aid groups have sprung up.

We have a stronger desire to help each other than we realised: three quarters of a million people volunteered to help the NHS and social care before the programme had to be paused while the system tried to catch up.

We have more creativity than we knew: people and organisations finding a million ways to offer their help, knowledge or skills to others, often for free.

What we’ve found does not, of course, begin to balance out the devastating impact of the things we lack, let alone the people we have lost.

And those good things are no more evenly distributed than the deaths and the shortages, exacerbating already deep-rooted inequalities. But given how difficult the coming weeks (and years) will be, we must make everything we can of what we’ve found, and what people have offered to give.

This moment of people stepping forward and reaching out to each other will pass very quickly. Without action, it could be replaced by something much bleaker in the hard years to come.

The story of the next few weeks will, I believe, be of the NHS doing better than feared.

But the challenges within social care will be brutally exposed. Particularly where three problems are found together: lack of money, lack of central planning or strategy, and buildings which house too many people in close contact.

We will rebuild our social care services after this. But surely we cannot want to reconstruct the broken systems which contributed to us being here?

I believe that building better systems should be based on three closely linked principles:

• A renewed drive towards living at home, or a place which feels like home
• Formal support combined with community connection
• Care organisations controlled and run at the neighbourhood level

For more on how these will work together, read the full blog: https://www.thersa.org/discover/publications-and-articles/rsa-blogs/2020/04/social-care-reform