What is more important, a care home or a new hotel?  We are in the midst of a ‘care crisis’ and yet the ‘buzz’ in Lyme Regis is all about the plans for a new Grovewind hotel submitted to Dorset District Council for a luxury 20 bedroom hotel.  The property was formally the Holmcroft Residential Care Home, closed in 2006 for refurbishment, re-housing its residents while the work was undertaken but it never re-opened.

Surly completing the work and restoring the building back into a care home would be much more beneficial than opening a hotel, especially considering the demands of a rapidly increasing need for residential care homes and a ‘boom’ in the number of elderly requiring care homes.  Not to mention the stress and confusion of moving the former residents into new homes while refurbishing was carried out on the Holmcroft care home was never resolved.  I wonder how many of those former residents we disappointed or upset to find they wouldn’t be returning to their former residence they’d come to know and love!

There are currently just over 24’000 care homes in the UK according to / and I sincerely hope that number increases rapidly soon to account for the rising demands for more.

Health Secretary Andy Burnham stated that the current system put in place to care the frail and venerable elderly “cannot cope” and went on to discuss how this system is going to be revolutionised in the future.  Their vision is a National Care Service which is fair, simple and affordable to replace the much debated ‘means test’ system we currently have in place which has been accused of being an over-burdened system with insufficient funding and inequalities.

This ‘Care Crisis’ is worsening because more people need care as they are living longer – in 1948 life expectancy was 66, today it is 78 and there are more people over the age of 65 than there are under 18.  The current demands for care homes and care is proposed to increase by about 30% over the next 20 years!