Retirement communities attract quality staff and offer savings for NHS and social care budgets
After Alan Wheatley was widowed last year, it looked as if he would have to go into a care home. Having had a stroke in 2013, he found himself unable to cope on his own and took to sleeping in his lounge. On several occasions, he ended up in hospital after falling.
Just when residential care looked inevitable, Wheatley heard about a new extra-care housing scheme opening on his doorstep in Kingsthorpe, Northampton. He knew the location well – he played darts in the social club that used to occupy part of the site – and the idea of having his own flat with care and support on demand appealed to his desire for independence while offering the assurance of help if needed.
Wheatley, 69, became one of the first residents to move into Balmoral Place, a development of 80 flats, and has since made himself invaluable. Not only does he do a lot of internet shopping and form-filling for fellow residents, but he has become a busy volunteer gardener tending the borders, tubs and hanging baskets around the scheme. He even has a seedling propagator in his flat.
“It all started when I asked if they’d mind if I did a bit of weeding,” says Wheatley, a former mechanic at the Aston Martin car plant in Newport Pagnell. “Then they asked if I wanted some equipment. I’ve got 150 primroses coming this week, which I’ve paid for myself for the moment, but we’re raising a fund to put towards the flowers.”
When he arrived, he had four visits a day by the on-site care team. Now he has none, though all flats have a 24-hour emergency call system. Would he have settled equally well in a care home? “No. It would have been detrimental to the way I live, to my quality of life,” he says. “It’s the flexibility here that makes all the difference.”
Balmoral Place has been developed by housing and care provider Mears Group, which has had a difficult time trying to establish itself in the homecare market. It is now focusing more on extra-care, which it sees as tapping into huge demand from older people like Wheatley who want the combination of their own front door, company when they want it and the security of knowing care is on hand.
“Apart from the fact that housing-with-care is really working for us, it’s the right thing to do,” says Alan Long, Mears executive director. “One real contrast for us is recruitment: the biggest single issue for staff is working with the same service users, so it becomes more than a job. We had more applicants for posts at Balmoral than we had vacancies. That’s probably normal in most people’s worlds, but I can assure you it’s not been normal in mine.”
Long tried and, he admits, largely failed to persuade councils to change the way they commission homecare, wanting them to pay for people’s reablement and other positive outcomes rather than for “time and task”, where staff have a certain amount of time allocated to each task with little chance to build relationships. He is now tackling the housing-with-care agenda with equal zeal, noting with dismay that the government’s social housing green paper last year contained “not a single mention” of building more retirement housing.
His frustration is shared by Associated Retirement Community Operators (Arco), which represents 27 providers of housing with support for older people. It says that only about 75,000 or 0.6% of people aged 65 or over in the UK live in what it terms “retirement communities” – which it distinguishes from basic retirement or sheltered housing that does not offer care or support – compared with 6.1% in the US, 5.4% in New Zealand and 4.9% in Australia. If UK numbers roughly tripled to 250,000 by 2030, which is Arco’s campaign target, cumulative savings of £5.6bn would by then be realised in the health and social care systems.
When the NHS long-term £20bn plan was unveiled in January this year, Arco executive director Michael Voges said: “Improving the planning, funding and legislative treatment for the [retirement communities] sector would help unlock £40bn of investment over the next 12 years – twice the amount of funding being dedicated to this plan.”
Slowly, however, the health and wider social care sectors are waking up to the potential of extra-care housing. At Balmoral Place, four of the flats are reserved for the NHS’s Nene clinical commissioning group, which commissions healthcare for most of Northamptonshire and uses the accommodation as “step-down” beds for older patients discharged from hospital but not yet ready to return home. They stay an average six to eight weeks, with care provided by Mears’ team and visiting doctors and therapists.
Of the other flats, 70% are reserved for council referrals – split evenly between social care and housing – and the rest are available for private rent. The weekly cost is just under £300, including service charges and a £15 “peace of mind” charge for overnight care response. For those eligible, housing benefit covers all but the £15. Booked care sessions are charged extra on the usual means-tested basis.
Some residents have moved into the scheme with early-stage dementia and many others are expected to develop it. But Sian Davenport, Mears’ business development manager, insists that the scheme will be able to cope with their needs in most cases. “We want to provide a home for life. The vast majority of people should never have to move on.”
Balmoral Place is already finding its niche in the Kingsthorpe community. Its cafe is open five days a week, with hopes to go to seven, and its communal facilities are being used by local groups including a Rainbows Girlguiding unit, for ages five to seven, which has come in to help out with the floral displays. “We showed them how to put plants in and some of the basics,” says Wheatley, proudly. “They’ll be back come spring.”
Source: theguardian
