Debate contribution: Social Care Reform

Debate contribution by Ms Liz Kimmins on 8 October 2024.

MLA

Ms Liz Kimmins

Party at the time

Sinn Féin

Date

8 October 2024

Type

Debate contribution

Business

Private Members' Business

Heading

Social Care Reform

Assembly identifier

Official Report component 4581704

Read the official Assembly record

Text

I thank the Alliance Party for tabling the motion and the DUP for tabling the amendment, and we will support both. It is clear that the issue is critical to ensuring that our health and social care systems continue to function efficiently and effectively and deliver a much higher quality of life and better outcomes to people requiring care and to their families and carers. As with the subject of the previous debate, it is clear that the adult social care system requires significant transformation in order to deliver properly for some of the most vulnerable people in our communities. Having a fully functioning social care system will also ensure that our hospitals can sustain an efficient patient flow from the front door to the back door, as the Member who spoke previously outlined. Just last Thursday, I, along with some other members of the Health Committee, visited the Ambulance Service dispatch headquarters, where we heard directly from the people in the control centre taking ambulance 999 calls and calls from paramedics working on the ground. We heard clearly about the precarious situation that the Ambulance Service often finds itself in and about the difficult calls that those staff have to take, which involve keeping people on the line for significant periods while they await an ambulance to attend to them. That is coupled with the prolonged waits outside our emergency departments, and it is shocking that those waits are often for longer than 24 hours, with patients seeing numerous shift changes as they stay in the ambulance until they can be transferred into the hospital. That is often due to the unavailability of beds, which is causing bottlenecks in our EDs. That can largely be attributed to the inability to source care packages and care home placements to discharge medically fit patients from hospital. While the motion focuses on the need to make urgent progress on the work of the Social Care Collaborative Forum, it is important that we emphasise that not only is this impacting on individuals requiring care and their families and carers but the knock-on impact on others in need of urgent and unscheduled care is huge, as well as the additional pressure and distress for many staff — in hospitals and in the Ambulance Service — who often feel powerless as they wait to get patients into the hospital, often for a long time. The failure of our system to deliver accessible, reliable and quality care for individuals and to support their carers and families cannot be allowed to continue. We need to see the changes that are needed implemented at pace to avoid the further deepening of the crisis unfolding before us. As someone who has worked in adult social care, I have never seen the scale of the challenges that we see now, with families waiting months to secure what would previously have been seen as a basic care package. That is simply not acceptable, and we should not normalise it, particularly as the onus then falls on unpaid carers, who are already giving everything to deliver care for their loved ones. A number of things need to be addressed if we are to see the reform that is needed, but critical to this, first and foremost, is the workforce. I welcome the ongoing work of the Social Care Collaborative Forum in conjunction with other stakeholders — for example, the Northern Ireland Social Care Council and others — to make the caring profession more attractive but also to place appropriate value on carers as key people in our social care system, which will also allow for career progression and the development of skills. I look forward to hearing further information on the progress of workforce planning from the Minister. I appreciate the huge challenges before the Minister and his Department. I do not think anyone here underestimates that, but, if we are serious about transforming our health service, a fit-for-purpose, high-quality social care system is key.

663 words. Text as published by the Northern Ireland Assembly.

Assessment

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Assessed 21 October 2026 at 11:12 UTC by jev-1.13.0 (requested as typesafe/jev) under rubric 2026.10-r9, methodology 1.9.

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