Herts home-care provider sees demand for adult care services soar by 66%
A local home care provider, Abbots Care, has said that the demand for its adult care services in St Albans and Herts has increased significantly as it announces that the number of calls that it has received to its Hertfordshire headquarters has risen by 66% since March 2023.
Abbots Care, Hertfordshire County Council's lead provider of care-at-home services, but which also operates in Buckinghamshire and Dorset, has also received 54% more private client enquiries in the past year than the year before (2023).
These are enquiries coming into the company directly from local residents, rather than via the county council.
This comes as a recent report has revealed that help requests to Hertfordshire's adult care services have risen by 18 per cent compared to previous years. This report was discussed at a meeting of Herts County Council's adult care, health and wellbeing committee in February. Chris Badger, the council's executive director of adult care services, told councillors that this reflects "an unprecedented increase in demand for our services".
Abbots Care is subsequently rapidly creating more jobs as it needs to be able to meet this growth in demand.
Camille Leavold, CEO and founder of Abbots Care, which celebrates 30 years of operation this year, says: "The need for home social care has exploded over the past couple of years. We have recently brought on 45 more care workers to support our growth. That's roughly an extra 1400 hours of care we will be able to provide each week."
Leavold, who is also a non-executive board member of the Homecare Association, believes that there are a number of factors leading to this huge rise in the need for care at home services: "We have an ageing population and an increased life expectancy, along with a rising number of adults with disabilities as more people with severe disabilities survive childhood," she says.
"But we have known that this is the trend for some time and, since I co-founded Abbots Care three decades ago, there have been nine Prime Ministers, all of whom have been told by the care sector that we are facing a crisis. In the past 24 months our calls have increased from roughly 4500 a week in 2023 to 7,500 a week. This is unsustainable without some real Government support.
"It is 5 years since the first Clap for Carers in the pandemic and I cannot believe that the UK care sector is in the same desperate situation it was then, and nothing has changed. The sector urgently requires substantial funding to ensure its sustainability and to continue providing essential services to those in need. Government intervention is crucial to address the financial instability and rising costs, thereby safeguarding the future of care services in the UK. The Government needs to act now, and not keep pushing it down the road."