Wiltshire spends £20 per person less than other shire counties but is facing a severe funding crisis with an anticipated overspend this year of £1.5million.

The budget for home care services is already £250,000 overspent.

The cases of pensioners Ellen Matthews and Nancy Wicks illustrate how important home care is to people in need.

When 89-year-old Mrs Matthews fell over at home her confidence suffered and while recovering in hospital she could not see herself returning to her bungalow in Colerne.

But with the help of a community rehabilitation and response team, consisting of professionals from health and Social Services, Mrs Matthews was back home six weeks later.

Mrs Matthews receives home care twice a week which consists of care assistants visiting her home and helping her with housework and also bathing her.

Mrs Matthews said: "I'm pleased to be back home. I thought at first I would never manage again but people come in to help me and I'm getting back to how I was."

Social Services also helped Trevor Wicks of Chippenham care for his mother, 85-year-old Nancy, after she came out of hospital.

Mr Wicks, who visits his mother several times a day, has the assistance of two carers during the week, one who helps his mother in the mornings and one who visits in the evenings.

Jackie Davies, link worker for Social Services, said extra home care was put in to ease the pressure on Mr Wicks and to ensure Mrs Wicks could continue to live at home.

If Mrs Matthews had pursued her original choice of wanting to go into a residential home she could well have been in hospital far longer than was necessary because Social Services does not have enough funds to pay for people to go into care homes.

Currently, there are 147 people waiting for funding from Social Services to go into care homes and of those 99 are in hospital blocking beds.

Dr Ray Jones, director of Wiltshire Social Services, explained how the underfunding was hurting the county.

He said: "These two cases illustrate how important the care that we give is, but there are people who need our services who we are having great difficulty in providing for because of our funding situation.

"The difficulty is we are increasingly having to ration these services.

"The demands on our services are outstripping the funding we have got.

"We are overspending on home care services and the consequence is we are not able to provide the service to everyone that needs it.

"Some people who in the past would have received home care are not getting it as we have had to ration our services. We are having to concentrate on people who have got quite intense needs.

"This means, for example, that an elderly person who is frail and needs the shopping done for them or may need help at home with heavy housework is not getting help from us.

"The responsibility then falls back on family members or the elderly person struggles to do it.

"It is very distressing for the people in need and their families. It's also upsetting for our staff who know someone needs assistance and wants to help them."