‘We need to talk about the social care system and the health system as separate. Because the health system gets everything’

Zoe, a member of the Social Care Change group, shares her reflections after the third set of sessions.

“Lots of ideas today. Lots of stuff around the fact that the last one that we did, there were 120 ideas that came out to try and fix this.

And I found that really interesting, actually. Because of 120 little ideas, how many of them are part of a system – or a big thing – that needs to be changed? Because you can go about and change lots of little things. But really I think this is about a wider problem.

And I still come back to the fact that there’s just no funding. There’s no money. And there’s been years and years and years of no money. And this is now part of a huge problem.

Listening today, everyone talks about the health and social care system. And I actually think we need to stop doing that. I think we need to talk about the social care system and the health system as separate. Because the health system gets everything, as far as I’m concerned.

It gets a lot more of the money, it gets the kudos, it gets the titles, it gets talked about as the “national treasure”. But social care doesn’t get any of that. So, really, by talking about it as a health and social care system, we’re putting them together when they’re treated completely differently.

And I think, for me, that’s one of the big things I’ve thought about today. Do we really need to put them together or do we actually need to separate them completely? But there needs to be complete parity of how they’re treated, which there completely isn’t at the moment.

And that is one of the fundamental problems that we’ve got. That’s going to take some serious work. It’ll be interesting to see whether that comes out in future discussions as we go along. But I’m still hopeful! I’m still hopeful we can fix it.”