Today's (26/5/2016) Epsom Guardian reports that the CQC (Care Quality Commission) have recently criticised a care home in our area, run by Care UK.
The CQC carried out an inspection on the Milner House Care Home in Leatherhead, and have judged that the safety of the establishment is "Inadequate", and said that it "required improvement" in other areas too.
Care UK is one of the biggest players providing "outsourced" services to the NHS, as yet another example of our health service being privatised. If you have used the NHS 111 service recently for example, it could well have been a Care UK employee who answered the phone.
Once more, a private provider has been found to be providing a less than adequate service to the taxpayer, and indeed to the patient.
Social care provision is of course slightly different from NHS provision, for the moment at least, because while NHS care for the moment is free at the point of delivery, social care on the other hand is means tested, and the government's pre-election pledge for a "care cost cap" have failed to materialise.
Jeremy Hunt finally admitted that the policy to "cap the cost of care" was designed to create a business opportunity for the private insurance sector. When the insurance companies did not sieze this opportunity, the policy was quietly shelved until the end of this Parliament.
All pre-election pledges are equal, but some pre-election pledges
are "more equal" than others.
Isn't it strange that when considering the matter of so-called "7-Day NHS" (hint, we already have a 7-day NHS), Jeremy Hunt uses the argument that they have to do this, because it was a manifesto pledge, but things like the "Cost of care cap" (2015 Conservative pre-election pledge), or indeed the pledge of "No more top down re-organisation of the NHS" (2010 Conservative pre-election pledge), these can be conveniently forgotten when it suits the Government's privatisation agenda.
Former Labour Health Secretary, Alan Milburn has close ties with the company which owns Care UK - a firm called Bridgepoint Capital - you can read a little more about this by clicking here.
