Living well and maintaining choice and control for older people. Held at Cavendish Conference Centre, London

The care homes industry is at the heart of care services for older people with 450,000 currently resident in care homes across the UK and with figures set to rise considerably especially amongst the very old (those over 80) in the next two decades. With 20% of care homes delivering below minimum standards of care, Local Authorities have been called on to use their £14 billion buying power to drive poor quality care homes out of business and use their commissioning muscle to help the best establishments to expand. This conference supported care home owners, managers, medical and nursing staff, directors of adult social services, NHS managers, Council PoVA staff and all those concerned with the wellbeing of older people in care homes to meet the challenges of providing the best quality of care for this and future generations of older people in the UK. Criticisng some Local Authorities, keynote speaker: Ivan Lewis MP, Minister of State for Social Care, said the two things that bugged him about their approach to care home commissioning were that "...they don't do premium, they do bog standard - everybody gets the same..." and the mindset that in a commissioning relationship you can't treat people as partners - a view that he dismissed as "absolute nonsense".