Connecting across Continents - Insights from Australian Fellows
When travelling in Australia for her Fellowship, Rosie Richards attended the Winston Churchill Trust in Australia's, 60th anniversary convention for Fellows.
By Rosie Richards,
Later living that makes the most of every moment
“Later living that makes the most of every moment” is the vision of Brunelcare, the housing, health, and care charity based in Bristol. Established in 1941, Brunelcare provides care in people’s own homes, in specialist care homes, and reablement centres together with sheltered housing, extra care housing, and retirement living.
It is also our personal motivation as CEO and Chair of Brunelcare and as Churchill Fellows both focused upon community-based housing solutions. After many years of knowing each other in housing networks, we had never worked together until Graham joined Brunelcare as Chair in 2023 where Oona was already Chief Executive. Our Churchill Fellowships in 2012 and 2017 had fired us up for how we could learn lessons from elsewhere and make a real difference.
There are some real positives in the world of housing, health, and care. The Government’s commitment to invest more in affordable and social housing is clearly a good thing. The stronger regulatory requirement to provide ‘decent homes’ is obviously essential, though it has taken some tragic events to focus attention and action.
The desire and discussion about how to improve the status and pay for care jobs is fundamentally important – colleagues who work in care are immensely compassionate and skilled. The shifts in the NHS 10 Year Plan from hospital to community and from treatment to prevention are to be welcomed.
But there are some deeply worrying ‘drag anchors’ which risk holding back how we make the most of this moment for change. There is a serious disconnect between the worlds of housing, health, and care. At the same time, a confusion of public duties and responsibilities, together with diminishing real public budgets, can mean that individuals find themselves bounced around in the system. Shortage of affordable housing, difficulties around discharge from hospitals, and reducing public funding towards the cost of care can mean that later living is too often a stress rather than a pleasure.
Despite an ageing demographic with associated increased frailty, the commissioning of health and care by both Integrated Care Boards and Local Authorities risks not appreciating the contribution of the charitable sector with commissioner eyes fixed on price and short term. The planning system is known to be sluggish – and really is – the country is simply not making the most of how we should positively design and build the sorts of housing developments which we saw on our Fellowships.
And just when we needed to inspire confidence and growth, the charitable sector was hit by the increase in employer National Insurance which cost Brunelcare £100,000s this year alone.
"The inspirational people and organisations we visited as Churchill Fellows continue to be front of our minds in how we now work together."
But making the most of every moment is still the vision. There are clear opportunities for more and better collaboration (and related commissioning) between public authorities and charitable providers such as Brunelcare. We could do more to support discharge from hospital through additional reablement; we could redevelop more of our sheltered housing sites to provide more affordable housing; we could offer more of our buildings to other health and care providers as part of the NHS shift to community; we could provide even more and better paid care jobs if we were not taxed so heavily to do so; and we could help co-design new approaches if we were given more opportunities to sit at the table with commissioners and place shapers. We could do so much more as part of a community of changemakers – the appetite which our Churchill Fellowships have given us.
Our Churchill Fellowships took us to places where these ideas were already being put into practice. Graham’s visit to Australia on the theme of ‘Community solutions for providing homes and supporting people’ called for “closer collaboration between housing organisations and providers of support services including health, social care, skills development and social enterprise”. Brunelcare embodies this approach, though it still requires a lot of stitching together of public sector commissioners for each of those support services rather than a more integrated approach.
Oona’s visit to Holland, Germany, and Australia on the theme of ‘Housing the Millennials: ethical housing for generation rent’ advocated for “building mixed communities which do not segregate people based on their age or social class”. This is close to Brunelcare’s heart and one of our strategic priorities is to provide our residents with ‘a good quality of life in the community including connecting with our local communities’.
The inspirational people and organisations we visited as Churchill Fellows continue to be front of our minds in how we now work together to think new thoughts and do new things in order to meet the often complex needs of Brunelcare’s residents and enable them to make the most of every moment.
Brunelcare is partnering with Bristol Energy Cooperative to install solar panels on our care homes and reduce energy costs; has major ‘net zero’ refit projects on site; is redeveloping a number of our sheltered housing sites to provide better quality housing and sense of community; and is highly rated for the standard of our health and care services.
Making the most of every moment remains our ambition.
Disclaimer
The views and opinions expressed by any Fellow are those of the Fellow and not of the Churchill Fellowship or its partners, which have no responsibility or liability for any part of them.
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