Debate contribution: Respite Provision for Adults with Learning Difficulties, Complex Needs and Challenging Behaviour

Debate contribution by Mr Gerry Carroll on 21 October 2024.

MLA

Mr Gerry Carroll

Party at the time

People Before Profit Alliance

Date

21 October 2024

Type

Debate contribution

Business

Private Members' Business

Heading

Respite Provision for Adults with Learning Difficulties, Complex Needs and Challenging Behaviour

Assembly identifier

Official Report component 4604292

Read the official Assembly record

Text

I am happy to support the motion and the two amendments. Social care workers — paid and unpaid — provide and benefit from respite services. Failure to invest in those services is directly and actively harming adults and children with learning difficulties, complex needs and challenging behaviours, as well as their families, as we have heard.

Social care workers across our trusts and the community and voluntary sector provide respite services for thousands of adults and children, as well as their carers, each year. Despite their life-enhancing and transformative work, they are underpaid and undervalued. Unpaid carers are the invisible backbone of our society. They keep our health and social care services running. Many balance their caring responsibilities with paid work and education. According to the most recent census, as we have heard, 222,000 people in the North provide some form of unpaid care. Women, obviously, are more likely to take on caring responsibilities than men. In the North, around 3,000 children under the age of 15 are carers, which is a startling statistic. Carers face unprecedented pressures on their finances: 44% of working-age adults who are caring for 35 hours or more each week are living in poverty. All too often, the invaluable contributions of unpaid carers are not recognised. Unpaid carers experience their own physical and mental health issues, which are often exacerbated by the pressures of providing unpaid care. A lack of accessible and timely respite services only adds to those pressures. Demand for access to short breaks and respite services for adults with learning disabilities and children and young people with disabilities has increased, as has been said. Some children and young people urgently need longer-term residential placements, and in our current, collapsing system, some children have been staying in overnight, short-break units for over 90 days. That has an obvious, knock-on effect on the operation of the units, which cannot maintain a short-break service. In short, it is a broken system. It is unacceptable that, during a crisis where an emergency respite admission is required, families lack certainty and support. Where is the caring aspect of the NHS in this debate? More generally, we need to move to a social model of disability, rather than our current model, which is solely medicalised. A social model places responsibility on society and the Government, rather than the individual, to remove barriers and promote equality and social justice. Under a social model of disability, disabled people and their carers are more likely to be treated with the dignity that they so rightly deserve but do not always get. There is nothing wrong with people who have a disability or additional needs, but there is a lot wrong with our society, especially in its attitudes towards people with a disability. I am happy to support the motion and the amendments.

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

Assessment

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