The regulator should be ‘charged with checking’ that physical activity is being provided in care homes, a cross-party group of MPs have said in a report on healthy ageing
Care homes' provision of exercise for the older people that live there should be checked and rated by the Care Quality Commission, MPs on the Health Select Committee have said in a report on keeping older people healthy for longer.
The call is part of a wide-ranging report that concludes that exercise ‘is as important as medication to keeping older people healthy and happy’.
The MPs use the report to call on the government to use its reform of the social care system to ‘address the high levels of physical inactivity, including placing a greater emphasis on physical activity in the Care Quality Commission’s assessment framework’.
The report also calls on the government to ‘commission evidence-based exercise programmes to reverse frailty, reduce falls and help prevent or delay dementia’ and wants to see GPs and other clinicians prescribing physical activity as a core, routine offer - suggesting such measures will be ‘fundamental to the government’s objective of switching the NHS’s focus from treating illness to preventing it’.
It adds that the shift to social prescribing and a wider focus on boosting physical activity for older people will also ‘help stabilise the rising cost of funding the health service as demand continues to rise’ due to an ageing population.
Cultural shift
The Committee also calls for a national conversation and a cultural shift in the way that ageing is perceived and talked about in society, arguing that ‘negative stereotypes can leave older people feeling resigned to becoming inactive, at the point in their lives when a sedentary lifestyle leaves them even more vulnerable to illness’.
Health and Social Care Committee Chair, Layla Moran MP, said that health and care experts and government “all agreed that staying physically active can help older people to live not just longer, but healthier, happier, more sociable lives.
She added that the committee’s report “set out practical recommendations for Ministers to rethink how the NHS and social care services help older people”, including “greater accountability in care homes” after it heard from experts that “exercise can be more effective than medication, and these changes would also cut the NHS’s vast expenditure on drugs.
“It’s a win-win, and this report sets out how the Government can make it happen,” she said, adding that “retrograde ideas” about ageing that elderly people are left to fade away quietly… must be upended” to prevent “harmful behaviours that cause unnecessary suffering for individuals and their families”.
Care England chief executive Professor Martin Green OBE, who gave evidence for the report, said that “social care stands ready to support as a vital player”in the shift to prevention, and welcomed its recommendations to government to create a funded, national training programme on physical activity as it would “give our workforce the confidence to support residents and prevent frailty before it sets in”.
As part of evidence submitted to the enquiry, Care England said that ‘£96 million of NHS savings could be realised from an estimated £6.4 million investment to train 2 per cent of the social care workforce in physical activity and movement care provision’.
And Cheshire based care village provider Belong Care was mentioned in the report as an example of how physical and social activities can improve outcomes for older people.
