Health Minister Kate Beecroft has pledged that the length of visits by her department’s home care service will be extended.

Mrs Beecroft, who has been forced to defend a decision to stop a Department of Health and Social Care subsidy of the Meals on Wheels service provided by Age Concern, was last week called upon in Tynwald to outline how her department intends to honour a government strategy to assist people to live at home for longer.

Although she made the commitment to longer visits, Mrs Beecroft did not give a figure when asked by David Ashford (Douglas North) how many extra hours this would amount to.

The minister said: ’Following an external review of the Home Care Service we will now increase the time for each home care visit so that we can maintain and improve service users’ functional ability.

’This will lead to a corresponding reduction in the need to increase care packages and allow people to stay in their own homes for longer.’

The focus will change ’from carrying out tasks for people to helping people achieve agreed outcomes’.

flexible

’The Home Care Service currently delivers 700 hours of care per week and this is supported by 300 hours of commissioned support through flexible funding from private providers,’ she revealed.

But, in response to Mr Ashford’s question on how many more hours would be involved, she said: ’I think that would depend on each individual assessment, which will be what the needs of that person are.’

Mrs Beecroft said her department was also committed to introducing ’integrated intermediate care services’ to help people leave sooner and remain independent for longer. The scheme would be based at Ramsey Cottage Hospital, utilising 31 beds, she said.

’Improving intermediate care is an exciting and significant development that will modernise how we deliver health and social care whilst improving outcomes for patients,’ she said.

’My department continues to help people with the extremely successful reablement service, which offers short-term intensive home-based support focused on identified outcomes.’

Other measures included the planned increase of dementia care home services to cover the whole island and commissioning of a shared living scheme, to support people with a learning disability to stay part of the community.

Defending the decision to stop the Meals on Wheels subsidy of £159,000, Mrs Beecroft said it would constitute ’reckless’ use of taxpayers’ money when commercial operators were available to provide a similar service.