Dilnot says NHS-style social care is decades away. Lab yawns.

Sir Andrew Dilnot says an NHS-style care system could take decades, so a lab measured what fifteen years of waiting has done to the plan itself.

Dr. Petra Voidwell28 Sept 20261 min readShorts

Sir Andrew Dilnot says an NHS-style social care system could take decades to build. A lab checked what fifteen years of waiting had done to his 2011 plan. All nine copies now need help getting up in the morning.

The report is on my desk. It is the 2011 edition, ring bound, with a coffee mark on page four. We have been watching it for fifteen years.

Sir Andrew Dilnot said this week that an NHS-style care system could take decades to build. He also said the cost would be very substantial. My team wanted to know what all that waiting does to a proposal. So we enrolled it in a study.

We took nine copies of the original plan. We compared them with a control group. A control group is a set of things you leave alone so you have something to measure against. Ours was nine copies of a plan nobody had ever written down.

The results were clear. All nine copies of the Dilnot plan now need help getting up in the morning. Six cannot manage the stairs. The control group showed no change, because there was nothing there to change. Our p-value was very small. That means we are fairly sure this did not happen by accident.

"The plan is now old enough to qualify for the care it was meant to fund," said my colleague Dr Ines Farrow. "We looked into who would pay for that. The answer is decades away."

We should be careful. This is one study. It ran on one desk. We take the next reading on Wednesday. If the trend holds, the report will die waiting for the system it proposed. It will not be alone.