AIBU to stop helping after injuring myself lifting elderly neighbour?

Care work should be taken completely out of the remit of Job Centres. It risks someone being pushed into care work under threat of a UC sanction which increases the chance of abuse if you have someone resentful and working there who doesnt want to be

Couldnt agree more. I would be useless as a carer to people I dont know, and frankly there are times I struggle with it with my own parents. Its as much a vocation as medicine, teaching etc.

Care work needs to be paid much better and regulated with proper qualifications like nursing etc. All the companies that own these places are interested in is profit. Not their employees and certainly not their residents.

And care work should be better valued both in status and remuneration.

Sensible families set up a subscription to the local falls team, they turn up with safe lifting equipment. Calling 999 when to person is uninjured is not a great use of resources and adds ro the wait time of people needing hospital treatment.
you can help by making sure they are uninjured , making them comfortable with a pillow and blanket while you all wait for family to arrive.

Presumably said ‘sensible families’ would also have to move to an area where such a service exists? Then also move themselves to that area and remain on call to do that waiting with the person as per your suggestion?

there are times I think I’m living in a parallel universe.

Yes I was thinking that. From experience it does not exist in my area.

Its coming across like the "just call an Uber!" responses of a few years ago.

Really not sure what this means. This is a management issue. Care company management are perfectly capable of sifting out the people who don't want to do the job and sit there doing the square root of fuck all. When they don't, this remains a management issue and responsibility needs to be placed where it belongs. They have full control over who they employ!

Also, I found my current role advertised via the jobcentre on Government Gateway and I'm glad it was there. Also I'm much better than a lot of employees who were recruited via Indeed ads, and I have suggested we stop using Indeed because of it.

I have a lot of opinions and proposed solutions to prevent abuse and neglect in the care sector, but banning care companies from placing ads in job centres is not one of them.

Yes, and the insinuation that 1) families are thick/tight 2) they are prejudicing the care of others by their selfishness.

I’m so so sorry to deflect from the injury of the OP which is awful and should not have occurred (never a good deed…) but the naïveté and attitudes on this thread are a massive windup. Caring for elderly parents is bloody hard enough without having people judging you on the basis of assumptions and shaky knowledge of what options for care are available. No need for a Mumsnet report but over the years I’ve done this ‘job’ (that i never applied for, can’t resign from and absolutely don’t get paid for) there have been dark moments, often involving juggling falls, childcare, work and bloody judgemental fools like some posters on here, where I have genuinely got why carers of adults and children do what my mother would call ‘silly things’. The fear, obligation and guilt is horrendous.

I’m lucky to have had some good experiences with carers. Where I am, agencies offering full one hour slots, mainly private funded, are not recruiting the desperate and ill suited. There are some very different people who do the job including young students and older return to workers, mainly women but a few men too. No one is going to love everyone, but the majority have brought something to the role.

Whenever someone mentions the "local falls team", in my experience this customarily means the local NHS specialist community team. But you mention subscriptions, so you must mean something else.

Ye gods, we're sleepwalking into American healthcare model, aren't we? Getting speedy help after you've fallen over shouldn't depend on your ability to pay, for crying out loud.

That sounds as it should be.

Even if the people on the ground delivering the care don't see the money, there is a hell of a lot of profit being made by private care companies. They're not poor ickle lambs forced to employ anyone who turns up for an interview. When companies have inadequate hiring practices, it's because of corners the management have chosen to cut.

If someone has reached the stage where they are rolling / falling out of bed every night even with this in place, then it’s time for either 24hr waking care or residential care, sadly.

Neither of which the LA was prepared to provide because they would have had to fund it. Because she had no funding pot but had family - myself and DH - they deemed a home care package to be adequate.

Except this isn’t a one off! This has been happening frequently, his wife can’t cope and clearly the children have abdicated responsibility to the neighbours. So they cannot carry on as they are. I didn’t say a live in carer was the only option.

I do know how much it costs - a friend just had to get live in carers for her father. But those are their options - a call button, a full time carer, a home, or they go live with their own DC instead of expecting the neighbours to do everything.

Hi,
You and other neighbours have kindly helped up until now, but you all must stop immediately (you obviously won’t be able to assist for a long time anyway).
You have seriously hurt yourself and when he falls he needs professionals to lift him.
If they call you in future, call his children every time so they know how often it is happening and an ambulance to deal with.
It does sound like everyone has their heads stuck in the sand, they need much more help, possibly to move into a care home.

The neighbours do not have to do anything. But you are very ignorant about the alternatives.

A call button just alerts a company who calls an ambulance.
Living with adult children who are at work all day is not that much safer.
Care homes and live in carers are extortionately expensive and it is incredibly unlikely the local authority would pay if he can still drive.

Unknown to me my Dad ( aged 87) had asked his neighbour a lady in her early 70s who was already caring for her disabled husband to be his (paid) carer. The first I knew of this was when the neighbour called me to say that she was really sorry but she couldn't possibly care for my Dad as well as her own husband!. I was mortified. I had been so busy at work and my Dad had always been very independent, I hadn't noticed he was really struggling. Due to the distance between where we lived , we usually met up for coffee in the village between where we both live, so I didn't realise that he really wasn't coping at home and he said nothing. The decline in his coping was due to undiagnosed cancer. I was sorry for my Dad as he was a proud person who would never have asked a neighbour to become his carer if he hadn't felt desperate. The irony was that my busy job was in the NHS and part of it was helping people access care to be able to live independently! After that my sister and I stepped up and we also bought in paid help. But it was a real wake up call how fast things can go down hill. I felt really bad that the neighbour had been approached by Dad, she had always been a kind neighbour and it shows how quickly people like that can be drawn into becoming unofficial carers. Even if she hadn't been caring for her own husband it wasn't her job to be my Dad's carer!

There really is no talking to people. They are in La-la land about the options available. Magic buttons and the additional genius idea is to go and live with relatives. Brilliant! I just need to buy a new house big enough (evicting a child doesn’t go down well with social services), do all the adaptations that are already in my parent’s house, then pay for carers to come to my house instead of theirs for the times when I am working and parent would be home alone anyway. I’m
not being funny but even before I was in the position I am in now all this was bloody obvious to me, I mean, are people really that disconnected from reality that they can’t think the scenario through?

And....?

Once again - that's as maybe, but it's nothing to do with the neighbours.

As I said quite clearly.

… and poster after poster talking about the ‘responsibility of the children’, ‘abdicating responsibility’. They are not responsible. They may choose to help if they are
a me but they are not responsible. Elderly adults are not children. Adult children have no authority over their parents. I have one responsibility. My own child. Does that make the neighbour responsible? No, of course not.

Pragmatically, what should a neighbour do? I’d say one call or chat to family. No lifting. Call social services and report a vulnerable adult.

it distresses me the assumptions and judgements on here. You have no idea of all
the circumstances.

• children may have other elderly parents, step parents or relatives to care for.
• children have children they need to prioritise
• children may be holding down a full time job that they need to pay a mortgage and maybe, just maybe, get to their own retirement one day
• children have illnesses
• there are no children
• parent might be refusing help
• children may have no relationship with their parents due to neglect, abuse etc
• Children may already be doing a lot but just not visible; prescriptions, calls to dr, sorting out finances, online shopping, managing service contracts, sorting out repairs to house, researching options for care, liasing with occupational help.

can people just STOP hitching their judgey pants up and consider for one moment that the throw away ‘solutions’ are simplistic?

It’s a basic lesson in life- you can
only control your own behaviour, not that of others. It’s not up to the neighbour to source solutions and they are only a default if they choose to be.

Neighbour needs to not lift. Call 999, as you would if you saw anyone in the street. If someone else has called 999, don’t get involved. Speak to the children once (without anger or judgement) to let them know factually what has happened. Call social services if you think there is a vulnerable person at risk. Leave it at that.

You had a go at me earlier in the thread for expressing a similar opinion. My point that the neighbours aren’t responsible for providing care either. I’m not judging - I looked after my elderly mum at home so I know how hard it is, but you seem very reluctant to accept that a lot of families distance themselves once things start to get difficult.

My own experience is from looking after my mum who was diagnosed with vascular dementia in hospital after a seizure. The doctors involved in her care rang me and asked for a meeting to discuss ongoing care on discharge and were nothing short of astounded when I said I would be taking her home to live with us and was happy to be involved in arranging care. I was told in no uncertain terms that it was very rare, and that in many cases families abandoned their relatives in hospital or flatly refused to engage with appropriate care services.

And I have similar experience to OP in dealing with an elderly and very vulnerable neighbour. His family rarely visited and when they were contacted after it became clear he could no longer live at home, because of the nature of my profession, they basically asked if I could advise on how to circumvent care fees for their dad so they didn’t lose their inheritance. They didn’t want to pay for appropriate care, but they didn’t want to provide it themselves. It happens.

OP’s situation is that she has been called on repeatedly to provide inappropriate care. She has the family’s contact number so it’s appropriate to call to them to make sure they are aware of what’s happening and ask them to help. If they’re not prepared to then the neighbours step back, stop providing help on demand, call an ambulance and pass on the family’s contact number. There is a clear safeguarding issue here - one parent has dementia and the other is so severely disabled as to put their ability to provide proper care in doubt.

I am absolutely gobsmacked that you and your neighbours have been picking this gentleman up when he falls. This is a job for people who have been trained to do this safely and luckily for you there are such people - you will find them inside ambulances. You must call 999 whenever this man is on the floor. Make him comfortable with a pillow and covers and wait with him for help. I hope you feel better soon.

I’m sorry you went through this. In the area I work, social services will not fund 24hr home care. I have worked with several families, though, whose relative has become unsafe at night due to frequent falls, wandering etc, basically behaviour that requires supervision so a person who is awake at night to monitor. Once we’ve shown that the other risk management measures have not worked (floor beds, alarms for example), we have advocated for them to have residential care funded. It’s not reasonable for family to provide 24hr that requires 24hr active supervision. Once someone cannot live safely at home without a maximum package of care (usually 4x1hr per day x 2 people or the equivalent hours with one carer on each visit) then residential care can be considered. As long as the client (if they heve capacity) and / or the relatives with PoA agree, then social services will support this.
One of the main barriers (And I’m not suggesting this is what happened in your case) is families refusing a move to residential care and only being willing to accept 24hr / overnight care at home. This is not an option unless self funded or in the rare cases that CHC funding / fast track end of life is in place. Then you reach an impasse. Safeguarding and best interests may come into play here.
However much we would like to support someone to stay at home, 24hr home care is only available to those who can afford to pay for it. It’s rubbish, but it’s been the case for a very long time.