BetterCareScotland on blowing the whistle!

Silence is compliance!

Although Scotland’s adult social care system routinely fails those it was intended to support, the proposed National Care Service for Scotland was voted down at Holyrood for reasons that defy logic. For social care service users, this issue could determine how they vote in the forthcoming elections.

The current system is so dysfunctional that the Feeley Review reported in February 2021 that a key determinant of social care outcomes for people in Scotland is LUCK! This is a bad advert for Scotland’s boast of world-class social care.

Using publicly-available data and the experiences of our subscribers, BetterCareScotland goes beyond the findings of the Review to understand why people in Scotland have come to expect poor social care outcomes and discovers that the public bodies with responsibility to deliver and regulate social care – Scotland’s local authorities and its Care Inspectorate – are not held accountable when things go wrong and this absence of good governance has eroded the democratic social contract.

Left in the hands of public bodies which lack commercial acumen and expertise in economics and risk management, Scotland’s social care system has long operated at the expense of those it should have served and is dogged today by irreconcilable conflicts of interest and moral hazards which local authority and Care Inspectorate practices have hard-wired into a system that could not have been better designed to fail.

Successive internal promotions to senior posts of cognitively-biased public sector staff coasting towards retirement have maintained the status quo in public bodies where change was and is needed, further driving down the standard of care and creating the perverse incentive to conceal the morbid state of social care operations and the poor social care outcomes being delivered – if, in fact, anything is being delivered: BetterCareScotland finds local authorities today employing social workers for the express purpose of denying people care.

The Feeley Review damns with faint praise local authority social workers and the Care Inspectorate. But morale is low in local authority social care departments, in particular those headed by people with no social work background or the qualifications and experience they would need to be employed by the very departments they run, and at the Care Inspectorate where the Executive and Board preside over a culture of, at best, wilful blindness. The Scottish Social Services Council, the membership body for social service workers – social workers and care staff – operates at a snail’s pace and does only what is required.

BetterCareScotland subscribers who have blown the whistle, find themselves facing local authorities and social care regulatory bodies using every means at their disposal to stonewall disclosures of abuse in poorly-resourced care homes for older people while keeping in business the care home owners despite the risks to vulnerable residents and staff exposed to working conditions the public sector would not, nor be expected to, tolerate. BetterCareScotland finds that, when their commercial gambles fail to pay out, these care home owners can expect to be bailed out by a local authority dispensing largesse with the life savings of vulnerable self-funders to protect the public purse.

And that the Scottish Public Sector Ombudsman has a history of closing ranks with public bodies.

And, now, a majority of MSPs have had their say.

At the root of this systematic seeming-indifference to the horrendous experiences of vulnerable service users lies the incentive for people in powerful positions to act in their own self-interest.

Good governance is the sine qua non of the sophisticated advanced economy. In its absence, people cannot have confidence that their rights will be respected so it comes as no surprise to BetterCareScotland and our subscribers that people in Scotland have lost trust in their social care system and those who preside over it. Reform cannot come soon enough!

BetterCareScotland provides a voice for those who are made to feel isolated or are silenced when they reach out to their local authority or the Care Inspectorate.

For those who dare not blow the whistle, let BetterCareScotland do it for you! Join forces with us! Together we will campaign for an enlightened social care system with good outcomes the norm for those needing care in Scotland.

Love and Peace!