Can States step back from care?
GIVEN all the predictions for demographic change in the island, and the truism that ‘we’re all getting older’, one would think, and plenty of people do say, that the care industry should be one of the most lucrative business opportunities around.
But, as the head of the sector association tells us today, it’s far from easy money. It’s a costly business, with huge capital overheads and challenges in finding, recruiting and retaining staff which every business depends upon.
Hence concerns voiced by Deputy Lyndon Trott, who fears that while the St John’s Residential Home was a unique case, as a private business housed in a States building, other care home operators may one day also find that the business is just too difficult.
And if the States is presented with another property and beds, all with long-term care patients attached, what is government to do? Leave them out on the streets?
It’s yet another challenge of the demographic time bomb and if the only answer is the simplistic ‘let’s have more cash in the public purse’, then it can only be expected that the public sector is likely to grow to accommodate more of these care responsibilities, inflating costs further with associated pension rights for staff we’re already seeing.
Where are our future care homes, operators, and staff? It’s planning that is needed to avoid ‘nationalising’ the care sector by stealth.