To think carers are classed as unskilled but expected to be skilled when things go wrong.

One of my many jobs was teaching 'Health and Social Care' in an international college.

There were some fantastic students who worked as carers whist studying to take their skills back to their home countries.

There were other, however, who could not understand the work, and I do not think should be carers. I know a lot of it was cultural.

I had one lesson talking about the different faiths patients / clients might have including those with no faith.

I set a piece of work for each to pick a faith / religion / culture to research and then feed back to the rest of the class. Things like if they want minister to visit, if the patient has a coloured thread around their wrist - don't cut it, it might look like someone is ignoring their new baby but this could be a cultural practice.

I had one student who was supposed to be researching Buddhism, her presentation was about how if she was caring for a Buddhist she would take her Bible in to tell the patient they were wrong, that they should not believe in anything other than what is in the Bible.

We had a rather one sided discussion where she could not understand why that would not be appropriate.

I did home care for a good few years due to the flexibility of the job around my kids. Pay wasnt brilliant, and a meagre fuel allowance but tax rebate could be claimed at year end.
We mainly dealt with the elderly and a few younger disabled people but very few incidents of violent clients.
One of the main things that stood out was that once the elderly/infirm person had been assigned a care package, many families were under the impression that it absolved them of any responsibility towards Grandma/Grandad/Auntie.
Very sad x

It’s more expensive to have it in house though. The carers thst work directly for the council are the rehabilitation team where I am, they get £15 plus pool cars plus pension.

The idea is they get people back to independence after a hospital stay or as good as it’s going to get and hopefully the contract can be taken on by a care agency who are paid under £10 per 15 minute visit. No cars to maintain or future pension liability, no paying travel time, and you can blame someone else if it all goes wrong.

Same as an unpaid carer for family.

I'm apparently a skiver who takes people's benefits (a few pence over 86 a week and approx 55 in uc a week) and sits on my arse and do nothing according to my abusive next door neighbour who blasts music at all hours and bangs, hammers and shouts through the wall.

I am forever chasing my tail, never get a full night's sleep, never get a day off, I'm in a lot of pain my doctor won't medicate me for as they've removed two painkillers I was in for a long time to function as they're not covered by the NHS anymore and she won't replace them. just have to keep trucking and cover all eventualities whilst keeping two people out of care homes ans saving the government thousands a year.

If you are a community carer, often using your own car and rarely getting paid the adequate expenses to cover that. You keep working while you are ill because theres neither the sick leave or the staff to cover. The first job of the day is someone who feels unsafe and who hit your colleague but there's not the funding to go in 2s. The second job you go in 2s but your colleague is half arsed. You have back to back visits that you are already late on because the commute time is factored in badly, some agencies dont pay you between jobs.

Youve visited the same person 3 times today for 15 min at a time. You get them up in the first, throw some clothes on them. Microwave a meal in the second, you are torn between actually speaking to them while it cooks or wiping round the bathroom. You have a tiny chat while writing your notes but it doesnt feel like enough. The family keep asking you to check the expirary dates in the fridge but there's no time and can you make sure she gets a wash

Your last visit is at 5.30 pm and you are having to putting to bed. You dont want to because it seems ludicrous that a grown adult gets no control over their bedtime but they are first on the bedtime round so you have to. They dont want to go to bed but there's no alternative. You are already running late.

You can see why people either leave or let it wash over them and become cold.

Excellent post.

I agree.

But it's not just a matter of training and more money - sometimes the carers need to be physically strong too.

I remember a discussion on here about problems in A & E where antisocial people cause problems. Health professionals shouldn't have to deal with nasty, violent people in A & E for all kinds of reasons. What they need in every A & E is a massive security person or bouncer to ensure horrible thugs don't threaten staff or other patients, and to get them and their families to leave when asked.

I'm not suggesting carers need to be thuggish themselves! Just strong enough and trained to deal with what might be a big, strong, wilful. patient.

And I hadn’t read this either when I posted. Saying exactly the same thing as me.

I actually think it's more fundamental than that. Caring is repetitive and difficult work that women have historically been lumbered with as they have had very little alternative. Now society has shifted and more women feel they can opt out of caring but this doesn't solve the ultimate conundrum. We all need care at various points in our lives and if we can't rely on relatives that love us to provide it for free then how on earth can we persuade other people to provide it to us? Most people don't have enough money to be able to afford enormous care bills and the state can't afford the bill either. Factor in the vulnerable and disabled who can have extraordinary care needs and it's pretty obvious there isn't enough money, resource or dedicated carers to go around.

It's all very well suggesting we pay more to carers but would you really be happy to pay that personally either at the point of needing care or as some very high tax over your lifetime? This is what would be required and even then you would only attract people that were looking for financial gain and don't have a huge passion to care for people. Too many on this thread stating that they couldn't be carers etc, well that's how virtually everyone feels and yet demand for carers will only increase.

The only answer I believe is that we begin to accept that we all need to care for our own more. It's a bit like jury duty, nobody wants to do it but it's a duty we must all shoulder to some extent to keep society functioning. The idea that you can outsource care to the extent that we currently believe is completely fictitious and it is only not exposed because of the amount of informal care being carried out by relatives and friends. People then begin to think they are somehow doing the state a favour by caring for their loved ones, when in fact it's a necessity. We all can't walk away from our caring duties as the system would implode and our vulnerable would ultimately be severely harmed and die.

No one wants to do it, the pay is low and often you are at risk of injury, so the only people who take it up are either truly wonderful compassionate people, in it for the right reasons, or those who just need an unskilled job for money and that’s the only type of available job around.

Two opposite ends of the spectrum. The ones who care and are good at their job, get more and more responsibility and are often given the more difficult cases as they do it without complaining- until it gets too much for them and then they leave. It’s a vicious circle and I’ve seen it happen time and time again.

The ones who don’t care, aren’t any good anyway.

I don’t know what the answer is.

Edited to add in the time it took to write this post, the post underneath it has proved my point where the posters husband has left for his own mental health.

I agrer with op.My husband used to be a support worker for adults with autism. It was care in the community at it's most basic, trying to card for people who couldnt live at home with multiple needs including toileting, feeding and speech issues.
He was paid min wage for this work while dealing with colleagues from other countries who spoke pidgin english and didnt want to be in the job, just sat on their phones all day calling their families and complaining about the job they were being paid to do and a manager who was running 6 other houses.
Yes, it would be great if there was more money in the collective pot with better training, safe guarding for everyone including staff but there isnt due to budget constraints and the way some companies work to pay higher up management like CEO etc.
It is a sad way that the world of business is run and due to his mental health, my husband no longer works as a support worker.

I'm not convinced it will mean more CT when private companies have a profit imperative

Either way. I 'm not personally opposed to more CT as we all benefit from good public services

She’s saying she gets paid 20 pence per hour more than the cleaners, not that she gets paid £20 per hour

Social care budgets are really screwed. Just my county spent 20m over budget last year on adult social care

Something needs to drastically change but currently the pressure is on to spend less money on social care not more

This results in people ending up with care that is cheap in the short term, but expensive in the longterm for example people not having 2:1 when needed, being placed in less supported care than they need. I could count hundreds of cases from my own nhs experience where people are given care packages that dont meet their needs that wind up being really costly, when they wind up in hospital or placements breakdown.

Because the spending is so limited, often people are put in incorrect placements or given really optimistic statements of their needs to care homes etc.

Then the care homes staff that assess often do so to fill a bed, rather than because they are truly the right home. Often people are accepted to live their by someone who will never be involved in their care

The system is a mess

And controversially but not controversial in my opinion

Poor working conditions means a lower quality of staff. Often people dont enjoy their jobs, have been assaulted a few too many times. Lots of people didnt want to work in care in the first place but it was a job that was hiring.

There are a small portion of people that stay working in care where it's truly a vocational. A big chunk of people who have the right caring personality, get too burnt out by not being able to give the care they want to. They end up trying to pull the weight of vacancies, and for the burnt out or poor staff. A big portion of them either become the burnt out staff themselves or leave creating the vacancy

She’s saying she gets paid 20 pence per hour more than the cleaners, not £20 per hour

My sister has permanent wrist damage. She’s always scratched in the part of her neck, huge nail trails, she adores her clients, she works on a dementia ward.
A huge problem how easy it is to get a job in care, you’ll get people doing it just for the hourly rate. I see carers all the time on their phone, ignoring the client, it attracts people who don’t care. The training should be made harder and more often, build the skills but also weeding out the crap ones. The scratching lady is the main culprit, her daughters insist she has nails manicured not cut back.

I know what they pay - friends run a care company franchise.
There’s a difference in pay depending on the type of ‘care’ provided.

Of course they are allowed to bring things back in house - they choose not to as that would mean higher wages on LA pay scales with unions to negotiate with. But all that may be changing soon as new legislation comes in. This may mean more pay for care workers but it will mean everyone paying more council tax so those of you on this thread saying 'pay them more' I assume you'll be happy with that?

It’s because they’re jobs mainly done by women. And we know that’s not valued in society.

Indeed. But that can be changed

We dont have qualifications for some of the skills needed. Society as a whole struggles to quantify soft skills and put a qualification framework in place for them. We see it as personality, not something that can be measured or taught or assessed. But the reality is that we want empathetic, patient, responsive reliable people and not all people have those attributes and employing people without them is dangerous gor the person being cared for.

Also we lot do have the care specific qualifications

And there isnt an exact correlation between qualifications and pay anyway, otherwise all the highest earners would have phds and thats not the case at all.

Your school cleaners are astonishingly well paid then. That's nearly 60% more than minimum wage.

Going in to care work often gets floated on here as a easy job to get straight in to. It's not for everyone and often doesn't work around family life at all.

I was left in sole charge of 12 teenagers/young adults who Were very very vunerable. Self harming, suicidal, violent doing drugs etc you would count the seconds of your shift and hope no one overdosed or tried to kill themselves. Attacked you or eachother.
It was overwhelming the responsibility. Even the police work in teams.

They couldn't offer me dependable shifts it would be last minute phoned up on the day to come in ,I'd have to try and find childcare. I lost my funded childcare hours because they didn't pay me for 6 months. Only when I handed my notice in they finally got my wages right. The shifts were 7.30am till 5pm so no good either way for school that day or the other shift was 10.30am till 7.30pm so I could do school drop off but not pick up. My school has no wraparound childcare so it became impossible to do long term. I relied on my husband being really flexible which then put his job at risk. Clearly we wasn't going to prioritise a minimum wage job over his higher paid job.

I'd say it was a really specialised skilled job but it's so undervalued and misunderstood by many.

One of my kids spent years running about the town centre trying to catch a pigeon- the alarm on his face when he did so and didn’t know what to do next was a picture.

As a society we have become medically skilled at keeping people alive, but have no real plan for what to do with them then. More babies survive pregnancy and difficult births than ever. And that is a wonderful gift. But a growing proportion will struggle physically and/or intellectually and we don’t have the will to spend the required resources (or maybe even enough resources full stop) to keep these people safe and happy. Not suggesting nazi death camps, just pointing out that actions have consequences and if we are the nice society that saves babies’lives, we ought to also be the nice society that does whatever it takes to keep people safe, including caring becoming a high-status competitive job.