We are not sure what exactly the Labour Insiders have against spinners, after all they are pretty proficient at the art themselves. Take their latest posting on bed-blocking.They point out the article in today's Evening Post that claims that delays in transferring patients from hospital to council commissioned residential care – is around the £1 million mark, with a total of 43 cases being “social care-related” and they imply that this is somehow a Swansea problem and specifically the fault of the Administration. A commentator on the paper's website also believes that this problem could have been avoided if the Council was not rebuilding the Leisure Centre. Perhaps he has been drinking with some Labour Councillors.
The money being spent on re-opening the Leisure Centre is, of course, capital spending, whereas the shortfall described by the Local Health Trust is revenue. The fact is though that this sort of bed-blocking is rife across Wales and Swansea is by no means the worst area.
In the last budget round the Administration increased the amount of money available for Social Services by a substantial amount. It was noticeable that when the Council debated these plans, Labour failed to raise the issue of bed-blocking at all. The truth is that the Trust is playing a game of its own, trying to put pressure on other authorities to bail it out.
We suspect that if the Labour Assembly Government got its act together and actually forced health and social services to pool their budgets, whilst throwing in some extra cash to initiate long term projects to do away with bed blocking, then the issue could be sorted out.
Update: An e-mail sent to all Councillors from the Director of Social Services trashes the claims by the NHS Trust. His letter to the Evening Post states that the latest census report for the period to November reveals 70 Delayed Transfers of Care for Swansea residents, 16 related directly to Social Care.
He goes on to say that the figures in the Trust's report relate to the whole Trust not just Swansea residents (and therefore Swansea Social Care), they provide insufficient analysis of type of delay to be helpful, and they use a definition called Social Care, which is not the same as Social Services.
In other words our analysis that the Trust was playing a political game to put pressure on its partners and the Assembly Government to bail them out appears to have been correct. Perhaps if they learnt to work with other agencies instead of undermining them they might not be in such trouble.
