Adult social care on the page

[concerning an institution somewhere in the troubled zone between health care and social care]

Having some contact with the business of adult social care, the piece from Medscape at reference 1 caught my eye. A short piece about MPs not being happy with the government response (reference 4) to their report (reference 3) on the implementation of the adult social care white paper (reference 2). Say 230 pages in all.

I don't suppose many of those working in adult social care will work their way through this lot and I certainly have not. But the story seems to be that while the white paper sets out some good proposals and all kinds of admirable aspirations, the framework, money and drive needed to turn these proposals and aspirations into a decently paid workforce providing decent care are not there. A story which aligns well enough with my contact with one small part of the adult social care system: not enough money and ineffective management, with the second following on in a predictable way from the first.

But who knows? Who is actually going to wade through all this stuff and produce a story which is short enough for the rest of us to read? With the wader not being part of the system which produced all the stuff in question in the first place. One might think that this was a proper job for responsible journalists: so will the Financial Times or the Guardian get around to it? Or do we just trust our leaders to get on with the job while we get on with our own lives?

All of which I find a bit depressing. Hard to see that anything much is actually going to move on the ground any time soon. But there is lots of expensively crafted paper work. 

Maybe I am being too harsh: there is more here than Prime Minister May managed before she was told to drop the whole subject. Maybe we really are slowly getting to grips with this thorny subject. I hope so.

Other matters

One of the objectives in the white paper, very near the beginning, is to so arrange things that 'people can access outstanding quality and tailored care and support'. Which struck me as irritating twaddle. Whoever, whatever is going to pay for outstanding, even supposing we knew what that was, in this long neglected sector, at a time when a lot of real incomes are going down rather than up and public finances are in such a dire state? 

The word 'market' occurs 64 times in the white paper, reflecting the continuing faith of our government in private provision for profit. While 'digital' at 48 beats 'training' at 42 by a short head. While 'fairness', picked out by Bard as one of four key themes, runs up a paltry 3. 'Collaboration' does a bit better at 11. Perhaps the writers of these documents should be encouraged to include frequency counts for the 20 most frequently used substantive words in an appendix.

I had fed Google's Bard the title of the white paper, that is to say the text of reference 2, less the bit about pages. It knew well enough what I wanted to know about and I thought it made a fair stab of summarising for me what the white paper was all about, even if it did strike a rather optimistic tone and even if the four key themes it extracted from the white paper were not to be found there, at least not so labelled. Themes yes, but different ones. So not a summary that one could just copy and paste into one's own summary, but as a way into a rather forbidding document, not bad at all.

It was happy to provide the frequency counts suggested above, as snapped above. I checked four of the numbers against the counts provided by Microsoft's Edge's 'Find on page' feature and found they were wildly out, although they were in the right order. So Bard's intuitions (as it were) were not bad and it knew that it should present the frequencies in a little table, but it couldn't do the actual sums - that is to say, much the same as the problem reported near the end of reference 5.

Maybe Google need to strengthen the small print at the bottom of the snap to something more like 'Bard does make stuff up and sometimes gets it very wrong...'. Just saying 'inaccurate' is a bit feeble, economical with the truth even. But perhaps they are more worried about the 'offensive' side of things, which follows and which I have yet to come across.

PS 1: regarding the top of the snap above, I don't know how the BBC knows who I am.

References

Reference 1: Adult Social Care Strategy 'Lacks Clarity and Detail': MPs have expressed disappointment over the Government's "lack of clarity and detail" over how they intend to plug a funding gap in adult social care in England - Peter Russell, Medscape - 2023.

Reference 2: People at the Heart of Care: Adult Social Care Reform White Paper - Secretary of State for Health and Social Care - 2021. 104 pages.

Reference 3: Long-term funding of adult social care: Second Report of Session 2022–23 - Levelling Up, Housing and Communities Committee of the House of Commons - 2022. 89 pages.

Reference 4: The Government’s response to the Levelling Up, Housing and Communities Committee report 'Long-term funding of adult social care' - Minister for Social Care - 2023. 40 pages.

Reference 5: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2023/06/fake-161.html.