Steve Gates, Exeter Chamber vice chair and managing director of Taking Care shares his views on the big business challenge in Health & Social Care
Health and Social Care have certainly been in the news a lot recently. Including the debates about whether the Chancellor would review, in his Spring Budget statement, the new National Insurance levy that is designed to specifically fund the growing demands of the NHS to clear the backlog of operations and the needs of social care as we increasingly “age” as a population. Which clearly, he did not change fundamentally, although he did slightly increase the level of income before someone will pay National Insurance – so there was some small benefit there.
The amount that we invest as a country in the NHS has been increasing recently with 2021/22 planned spending by the renamed Department of Health & Social Care set to top £190 billion, according to the Kings Fund. And ‘Human Health and Social Work’ activities have interestingly been one of the key drivers of our GDP recovery, with spend in this area increasing by 19% from pre-Covid times in February 2022. Health and social care is certainly an important part of both the health and business environment in which we all work.
In the wider Exeter area, we are overseen by the Devon Clinical Commissioning Group who themselves invested £2.2Bn in 20/21 in health and social care, with a £69.5m spent on dealing with Covid alone. Of this overall spend, 45% was spent on “acute care” (such as hospitals and operations etc) and 20% was spent on Primary Care (GP surgeries and local care services etc).
The key debates within health and social care are primarily about how the service recovers following the huge pressures, both financial, staffing, and operational that the Covid-19 pandemic has caused.
After two years of unprecedented change and turbulence there is a real focus on restoring services that have been reduced in their priority, with studies demonstrating that 45% of people with cancer symptoms did not consult their doctor in the first year of the pandemic and that as many as 40,000 fewer people being treated for cancer than before the pandemic.
As businesses we will increasingly be expected to pick up some of this burden in terms of the impact on our staff. It is likely over the coming years that businesses will need to step up and play our part in ensuring that both physical and, as importantly, mental health is supported amongst our workforce – taking us way beyond the simple requirements of Health & Safety and into the fields of prevention, and how to provide reasonable adjustments in supporting a longer working career and more older people within the workforce. In the future it will become more common for the workforce to have a working career spanning at least 65 years, given the improvements that we have seen generally in life expectancy. But how do we as businesses think about individuals who might have two or three major changes in career direction over that time and how do we ensure that we provide the right re-training and re-skilling that might be required to support a new generation of workers?
Within Exeter Chamber we have a number of members directly focused on health and social care – with Helpline and Taking Care providing 24/7 monitoring of personal alarms for the elderly and Home Instead Senior Care representing the largest private provider of domiciliary care in the UK. We also have the City Community Trust, supporting a range of health and wellbeing activities and encouraging better health through sports participation, and Hospiscare. So, we have much to be proud of in terms of our members participation in this important area.
And increasingly we can see that the health and social care needs of our local area will be met by a jigsaw of public and private provision. There are many major health and social care challenges that we have as a country. Within Exeter the average life expectancy is currently 82.6 years, a full 2 ½ years above the national average. Local forecasts are that the 65-84 years population within Exeter is going to increase by 20% by 2026 and the 85+ years population will increase by 50.2%.
We’re lucky to work in a part of the country with a strong life expectancy and as a Chamber are continuing to look at new ways to support our members in dealing with both the challenges and opportunities of a growing older population and an older workforce.
