People with disabilities can face additional barriers when trying to access services. The World Health Organisation has stated disability comes from these barriers rather the related impairment. Barriers can include […]

How has health spending changed over the past seven decades? How does the UK compare to other countries? What is the outlook for health spending?

With an election approaching, the Nuffield Trust’s briefing series challenges the NHS and social care manifesto commitments of UK political parties in advance of the vote. The second in our series looks at adult social care: a vital public service supporting people of all ages to live with dignity and independence but one that has been left with insecure funding, variable access, catastrophic costs for those in need, and high staff turnover. Reform is long overdue, and we set out the criteria we believe would need to be met for getting social care on the right footing.

A high-level overview of how individuals in England may access financial support from their local authority towards the costs of their adult social care.

The findings from the 2023 British Social Attitudes survey on public satisfaction with the NHS make for grim reading – and set politicians a tough exam question for this general election campaign. Overall satisfaction with the NHS was down, with less than a quarter of the public (24%) saying they were satisfied with how the NHS runs nowadays. This was the lowest figure recorded since the BSA survey began in 1983 and has fallen by 29 percentage points in just three years. Satisfaction with individual services was at record lows.

New Age UK analysis has found that 28,655 older people aged 65+ died in 2022/23[i] before ever receiving the social care for which they were waiting. This equates to an average of 79 deaths a day, 550 a week, and 2,388 a month. The Charity says that in many cases, had these older people got the help they needed their final days would have been more comfortable, and their families would have felt less alone and better supported.

IHE’s new report, ‘England’s Widening Health Gap: Local Places Falling Behind’, confirms widening inequalities in life expectancy between regions in England and within local authorities since 2010. These widening inequalities are associated with an average reduction in local authority spending power of 34 percent. Read the new article by the Press Association and covered by regional/local media across the country, including the Independent detailing the failings of MPs in their constituencies, linked below.

Ineffective discharge from mental health settings can lead to higher levels of patient readmission – an article from The Guardian earlier this year revealed that approximately 5,000 patients were readmitted on to mental health wards within a month of discharge.

Drawing on four rounds of interviews with parents affected by the benefit cap, this briefing outlines the harms the benefit cap causes, and details the difficulties households face in escaping the cap.

Older people at risk of being forced into residential care due to massive delays in making adaptations to homes. Two-thirds of local authorities took longer than the recommended six months to deliver an adaptation through the Disabled Facilities Grant, with the longest taking more than 24 months.