“Hats off to social care technology companies beating the drum for the sector and helping to shape the future of how we give and receive elderly care.”
— John Lanyon, CFA and Co-Founder of KareInn Digital Care Planning
Technology fixing social care
In an article published in Wired Magazine, “Startups are Scrambling to Fix the Social Care Sector,” the author Andrew Kersley sheds light on what health tech start-ups are doing to help shape the future of care. The article highlights that the UK has several different crises happening around social care at once and thus the challenge we have ahead of us. technology fixing social care
Why the urgency? “Due to a mixture of falling birth rates and longer life expectancy, the share of people over the age of 65 has risen from 10.8 percent in 1950 to 18.5 percent in 2019. By 2039, the Office for National Statistics expects that to rise to 23.9 percent.”
“Soon nearly a quarter of the whole population will be aged over 65, massively increasing the demand for elderly care.”
Kersley’s interview with Birdie Care also mentions other start-ups making inroads including KareInn digital care planning, Lifted, and LogMyCare.
Kersley highlights the “UK’s (and especially England’s) social care crisis, consists of several different crises rolled into one.”
- First, the impact of austerity on the councils, which fund social care – many local authorities saw their spending power slashed by a third – has meant the strain on these services is massive. This leaves millions going into debt to finance their own care privately, and millions more unable to even access care in the first place.
- Cuts to services also resulted in a postcode lottery, with wealthier regions having far better services than deprived ones, which operate on shoestring budgets.
- Then, there are severe staff shortages for care workers: low pay combined with huge workloads and immigration restrictions has created a shortfall of 100,000 paid carers.
- On top of that, the strains on the system are increasingly pushing care services to offer one-size-fits-all care with strict time slots for at-home visits by carers.
Finally, and in many ways underpinning the previous issues, the government’s lack of a vision for social care has made the system extremely fragmented. Thousands of private companies administer care through a patchwork of care homes and at-home visitation, a system funded partially by local councils and in part by individuals who pay for their own care.”
You can read the complete article here.
If you’d like to speak with John Lanyon about health tech and the future of the UK’s social care sector, you can connect with him on LinkedIn or email hello@kareinn.com.
More about John:
As the CEO of a global corporate financial advisory firm, John has spent many years working with businesses in a range of sectors including technology, healthcare, and energy, in the UK and globally. For the last 13 years, John was also a lead volunteer member of the Alzheimer’s Society research community, helping to fund and work with academic researchers in dementia care, cure, and prevention. John founded KareInn to deliver tangible outcomes for people living with dementia. He developed the Partnership Framework for Social Care as a means to help other social care businesses join the rapid transformation in social care.
