John Healey, the shadow health secretary, will chair this review, which will try to find out what people are most concerned about in, or as they approach, retirement. It will also ask what older people expect from core services, including the NHS and social care, consider "quality of life" issues such as the contribution older people can make to society, and how the UK can ensure "fair support" for all older people and future generations. Healey's group of advisers will be drawn from charities, academia, thinktanks and the health and care professions.
Tom Clark writes:
The wrapping up of healthcare within the older people's review betrays both political and social realities. The ageing of society is requiring the NHS to focus ever more on older people and the long-term conditions they live with, and issues such as care will therefore become ever harder to disentangle from the health service proper.
Politically, without any extra money to pledge, the party is shrewd to content itself with opposing the government's botched reforms, and concentrate its campaigns instead on winning the votes of the ever-more important grey vote. But what more can it do within limited resources to improve the plight of the elderly today? And after the Southern Cross scandal, and with the Dilnot commission about to report, what can it constructively say about financing the great cinderella service that is care in the UK?
