The health and social care system is under severe stress, due to a lack of high quality social care which saps the resilience of NHS services and patients, Age UK has warned in a new report.
The report warned that as the number of older people in England grows while funding for social care has declined and investment in healthcare has failed to keep pace.
Between 2005 and 2016 the number of over 65s increased by 19% (1.5m people) while the number of over 85s grew by 29%.
The increase in the number of older people is predicted to accelerate, the report warned.
Over 1m older people in England now have an unmet social care need, an increase from 800,000 in 2010, meaning they receive no help either from local authorities, relatives, neighbours or friends.
The report also found that one in five people aged over 65 was caring for another older person, with a quarter of those spending more than 50 hours a week caring for someone else.
The report, The health and care of older people in England 2015, can be found here.
Caroline Abrahams, charity director at Age UK said: "All the data in this report points in the same direction.
"The numbers of older people in England are steadily growing, and the proportion with long term conditions is growing faster still, but investment in health care overall is failing to keep pace and spending on social care has fallen quite spectacularly over the last five years.
"On the whole it is the community based services which help older people to sustain their independence which have seen the sharpest falls, or where supply is most obviously failing to meet rising demand.
"So, for example, GPs numbers are not keeping up with a growing older population and meals-on-wheels provision, once a mainstay of community care, is rapidly falling away."
She added: "Our health and social care system is designed so that social care and the NHS interact and support each other to help keep older people fit and well, but starving social care of resources is seriously undermining the NHS - our hospitals especially.
"This can be seen in the latest worrying figures for delayed discharges from hospital and emergency readmissions.
"Hospitals and other services are forced to ‘run hot' due to the extra pressure, increasing stress on the staff and making it ever harder to recruit and retain them.
"This is a destructive vicious circle and we are really worried that it seems to be getting worse."
Further reading:
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