I think i am in Lawsons camp
here isnt a bottomless pot of money.
At what point would a person become eligible for funded accomodation?
At point of diagnosis? Many diagnosed live happily for many years in the community
At the point that the family say they cant manage? My 'line in the sand' maybe very different to yours.
When the patient meets certain criteria? Dementia progresses so differently in everyone. Some may never reach the set critria..but be rock bottom of another area of dementia and their family on their knees but not qualify.
Much as i think the nursing component of care should be free at point of delivery, there will still be costs that the patient ( or their family) should meet. Food, heat and light etc- no one exists for free , dementia or otherwise.
My neighbor is 86, she doesnt have dementia, her general day to day living means she wont have £23k left to leave to her daughter, yet she could have if she had a place in a nursing home.....and that goes for the whole population, not just dementia sufferers
Yes, it gets very complicated doesn’t it?
And you are right about how do you work out who should get what, always an ongoing problem with any welfare benefits. There are lots of people who are in care apart from those with dementia and maybe if you want to apply this to one, then you can’t and shouldn’t ignore the others. Then that gets really scary.
Some people prefer to keep their PWD at home under very exhausting circumstances and though they may have carers coming in, they save governments a small fortune. What do you do for them?
It also raises the question of finding staff to care for those who would come into public funded facilities.
@Sonya1 points out that many people have never paid into the system and while I accept that some are work avoiding, there are many others who have lived in generational poverty. I think that’s when a country’s social conscience is put to the test. I believe that every community should step and take care of those who simply can’t. There’s a saying that says something like you can judge the values of a people by the way they treat their aged and needy.
The NHS was a wonderful innovation that was a highly progressive move. It never anticipated that people would live longer, that medical research would produce fabulous new techniques and equipment that cost buckets of money and that the needs of the population would change. It is swamped and struggling to provide the services it was meant to do.
Perhaps a better place to start would be working out how to solve its problems before stretching the purse strings to breaking point.