A PRO-independence think tank has called for community hubs to be at the heart of a new National Care Service.
Common Weal published a report which argues for the National Care Service (NCS) to be delivered from inside communities with a model for hubs which would mirror the role of GP surgeries.
The paper, titled Care in Your Community, was written by social work expert Colin Turbett as part of a major programme of work to design an NCS that matches the ambition of the Beverige report published in 1942, which was influential in founding the NHS.
The community hubs would be set up in local areas and would be the first point of contact for those who would need access to care services.
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The centres would have multiple functions such as leisure, social enterprise start-up support, Citzen’s Advice Bureaus, cafes or community banking.
The aim would allow the hubs to be accessible, reduce the stigma of approaching a care service and make it as easy as possible for people to find the support that they need.
It reads: “This diversity of use would instantly remove the stigma attached to some services; entry and participation would be encouraged and welcomed.
"Community hubs could, along the lines of provision already found in the Nordic countries, bring services together physically for those at the youngest end of society, and those at the older and most vulnerable end.
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"The investment would eventually pay for itself in replacing the fragmentation of reactive services that currently exist, with more unified ones based on need and prevention rather than crisis reaction and the marketplace. Such ideas based on a new definition of care have been discussed positively."
The report also said that during the pandemic the use of community hubs changed and became a place from where “community support is organised and coordinated”.
“Community hubs could be the centres for this process – places where services are devised, organised and managed locally on the basis of requirement and determination by the communities served.
"Such developments, of course, may not be needed in already well-resourced communities where there is resilience based on factors of relative affluence and extensive voluntary activity.
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"However, in communities starved of basics like work and opportunity, affordable community facilities and choice, where the features of poverty are endemic, the provision of community hubs could prove to be a game-changer.”
Author Colin Turbett (pictured), a former front line social worker for nearly 40 years, said:“Trends over the past twenty years or more have been to centralise services and distance them from their users.
"Our ideas take them back to where they belong, which is in the heart of communities. “Community Hubs have worked well through the pandemic.
"Let's build on that to transform care.”
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