Registered homes 2: nursing and mental nursing homes

Abstract

One of the major effects of the National Health Service and Community Care Act 1990 is the reduction in NHS accommodation for long-stay chronically sick, mentally infirm and elderly persons and the care of such persons in non-NHS accommodation. The implications of this are that the patients (and/or their spouses) are means-tested towards the cost of the accommodation and will have to use their revenue and capital funds towards the cost of upkeep, subject to the eligibility for income support at the lower level. The general public are slowly waking to the fact that increasingly the cost of care is falling upon the individual client and not borne by the state through the NHS.