Author: Kari Gerstheimer, CEO and Founder of Access Social Care
Legal Access Challenge winners, Mencap and Access Social Care, tell us more about their legal chatbot solution, which delivers free, accessible legal advice.
The Need
Most of us will need social care at some time in our lives. Social care is support provided to children and adults with needs associated with old age, disability, ill health or other vulnerabilities. It is hard to define because it can range from deeply intimate personal care; to practical support with daily tasks such as support to manage a budget or to shop; or supporting a person to see family and friends in the community.
Despite an increase in demand caused by an aging population, austerity means 25% less people receive social care than 5 years ago, 95% of local authority social care leaders have admitted that they are unlikely to meet all their legal duties to provide care in 2020. Our legal team has a 98% full or partial success rate with our cases, and yet we struggle to find legal aid lawyers to take the cases on. Community care law “advice deserts” and cuts to charitable advice provision mean that hundreds of thousands of people with social care needs are experiencing challenges with finding out about their rights and accessing justice. Helplines, like the Mencap helpline, are overwhelmed. Many advice seekers are digitally able, but information resources online are dense with text and hard to navigate, even for the most able.
In these uncertain times, and with all of the challenges that will no doubt fall in the wake of the COVID-19 crisis, now more than ever, we need to understand what social care means to all of us, how we preserve it and how we can all access it should we need to.