Last month on Conservative Home I wrote about the “crisis” in adult social care and noted:

“In my local council of Hammersmith and Fulham last year there were ten people on an average day, per 100,000 of the population, needlessly stuck in hospital due to Council delay in making alternative arrangements.  In Wandsworth the figure was below half of that:  4.4 per 100,000.  Why?  This is not a rhetorical question; I have logged the query with my Council for an explanation. But I would be surprised if the answer comes back that Wandsworth spends twice as much proportionately on adult social care as we do or has twice as high a proportion of elderly residents.”

I still haven’t had a an answer to that.

But there is another measure of how the service is performing – the satisfaction level among the “service users”. My query was as follows:

“I see that according to the “Measures from the Adult Social Care Outcomes Framework” the national figure has 64.4 per cent say they are extremely or very satisfied with their care. 85.4 per cent “reported that the services they received helped make them feel safe and secure.”  76.6 per cent “reported they have control over their daily lives.” 45.4 per cent “reported they had as much social contact as they would like”.

Please advise what the local equivalent satisfaction ratings are.”

I have had a response on this. For Hammersmith and Fulham Council overall satisfaction is 58.0 per cent (against 64.4 per cent nationally). The feeling safe measure is 68.9 per cent (against 85.4 per cent nationally). 78.1 per cent fell they have “control of their daily lives (against 76.1 per cent nationally) and 42.9 per cent feel they have as much social contact as they would like (compared to 45.4 per cent nationally).

So on three out of four measures we are behind. Also on two of them we are behind by quite a significant margin – including the most important judgment of “overall satisfaction”.

It’s just another opinion poll, of course, and we know how unreliable they can be. Yet surely the figures are of at least some concern.

Always talking about more money as the answer is simplistic – although the Council’s Public Health budget could be used on preventative measures. Where the Council could be doing much better is with a better relationship with the NHS – and for that matter between the Adult social care department and the sheltered housing team within the Council.