Equal Opportunities Committee, 20 Apr 2004

Meeting date: Tuesday, April 20, 2004

Official Report 133KB pdf

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Petition

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Care Homes (PE522)

Item 3 on our agenda is petition PE522. Do members have any comments on the paper that was circulated earlier?

The paper says:

"In January 2002 the Deputy Minister for Health and Community Care gave an undertaking to the Parliament's Health and Community Care Committee that, ‘work will be undertaken to improve our knowledge and understanding of the needs of younger people and the range and quantity of care services that are provided for them, with a view to informing our future policy decisions in this area.'"

At this point, it seems as if something is beginning to happen in that regard, but I would be interested to know what the timetable will be for completion of the work. That undertaking was given two years ago, yet we appear to be only at the beginning of the process. Could we get some information about how long the process will take? The petition deals with an important issue and fits in well with the wider disability issues that we have been talking about.

The committee could write to the Deputy Minister for Health and Community Care requesting to be kept up to date on the issue. I share Margaret Smith's concern that the process has taken such a long time.

We should make the point a little more strongly. Would it be appropriate for us to do so? The process is taking an inordinate length of time.

We should express concern in that regard.

Asking only to be kept up to date does not sound strong enough.

We will express our concern in stronger terms, in that case. Do we agree to write to the deputy minister in the terms that we have discussed to communicate the fact that we are not happy with the situation?

Members indicated agreement.

Related issues will come up in our disability inquiry.

Before we move on, I would like to make a point. In the two years that have passed since the undertaking was given, some children have gone from 14 to 16 and have entered adult life while nothing has been done with regard to the concerns expressed in the petition. I wonder whether the ministers are aware that people's lives are being affected. We are talking about individuals. Perhaps I should not say this on the record, but I get the feeling that there is not enough understanding of what the petitioner is requesting with regard to the fact that we are talking about real people with real problems. I would like the deputy minister to take that fact on board. However, perhaps I am being a bit hard on the Executive.

We can stress that point in the letter. You are absolutely right: the matter relates to the lack of provision for young people and, if the process takes three or four years, some of the people who are affected by the situation will not be young people anymore.

I have not researched this matter fully, but the timing of the undertaking that was given to the Health and Community Care Committee, of which I was the convener, suggests to me that it might have been given while the committee was considering the Regulation of Care (Scotland) Act 2001, which involved introducing a registration system into care homes. The issue that the petition is concerned with might have cropped up as an ancillary issue in that regard, which would mean that the Executive gave an undertaking in the general context of care homes rather than because the Health and Community Care Committee had specifically focused on disabled people in care homes. I believe that one of the issues that was thrown up at that time was to do with young people, lack of respite care and so on.

Basically, rather than the Executive having failed to act in response to a specific inquiry by the Health and Community Care Committee, I would guess that it might be that the issue was raised in relation to care homes in general, on which there has been a lot of action on the back of the Regulation of Care (Scotland) Act 2001.

I see. We will write a letter in the terms that we discussed.