AIBU to stop helping after injuring myself lifting elderly neighbour?

Same here. 24 hour care at home - even overnight care was not an option. We had a care package of two carers three times a day and they were looking to increase to four times a day when passed away suddenly in March. If I’m honest I do think that had she survived any longer they would eventually have agreed to a care home because the situation was becoming untenable.

We will have to agree to disagree.

the starting point should not be a presumption about family sorting out the situation. That doesn’t mean it is up to the neighbour either. The neighbour should ring family only to check they know factually what is going on, not to ‘ask for help’. Why would the neighbour need help? It’s not their problem to solve unless they want to make it so and it’s not their business to have expectations about the family either.

the fact staff were astounded you chose to care for a relative at home is indicative of how few people have the means and capability to do this.

the family of your neighbour were crass is asking you the question about avoiding care home fees, but they are not alone in doing this, and seeking information about this. Not being able or willing to provide care at home doesn’t mean that you can’t seek information on maximising preservation of capital, this may even enable decisions to benefit the person living. And are there selfish gold diggers in the world? Yes of course. But it’s an offensive and tired trope over applied to many people who are simply seeking to balance many conflicting priorities in their life.

I think this highlights really well the fact that families aren’t always aware of what’s going on, so where possible I think they are the first port of call to make sure they are.

The neighbour clearly needs help if he’s frequently calling on the neighbours and I think the family has a responsibility in the first instance to make sure they are fully aware of what’s going on and have done their best to resolve the situation. A poster upthread illustrated this nicely. She wasn’t aware that her father needed care until a neighbour rang and told her he had approached her to provide it.

the fact staff were astounded you chose to care for a relative at home is indicative of how few people have the means and capability to do this.

We’ll have to agree to disagree on this point, yes. The staff weren’t astounded that I chose to care for my mum at home - they were astounded that I wanted to be involved at all. That doesn’t speak to means and capability, it speaks to the willingness to be involved at any level. It’s an abdication of responsibility onto support services simply because they are there. Those same support services are under enormous pressure because they were never intended to be used in this way.

.. with a 'but' straight after🤷‍♀️. All the things you said still don't mean the situation has anything to do with the neighbours.

Do not help. In fact, I would not answer their calls anymore. I'd definitely call their kids and tell them you will not be helping anymore.

Can I check what you do?

For people who are wondering why bed rails cannot be used.

My late Mum had some when she was admitted to hospital. Late at night she tried to climb out and because they were so much higher she fell from a height. She was never the same again..they are bloody dangerous things. My late Father who was in a care home kept falling and they used almost a mattress on the floor and crash pads.

As another PP says - some elderly people do things almost to spite the person who told them not to.

My mum was 95, with advanced dementia and couldn’t even sit up unaided never mind climb the rails. There were bed rails on the bed she was in, in hospital a few weeks earlier. Because they wouldn’t provide them at home she was rolling over and falling out of bed every night. I agree that with the bed bumpers and crash mats she wasn’t hurt but it didn’t solve the problem of not being able to pick her up and there were some interminable waits for an ambulance to do the job, not to mention wasted visits from carers because they weren’t allowed to lift her. I do understand the logistics, but l don’t understand a one size fits all policy.

Relevance?

Yep. Time to ban all pointless jobs / industries and have a one-earner-per-household policy. Pick who works and then only one person needs to work at any given time to support the household. That person has to be paid enough for the family / household to thrive (not survive, not live: thrive, i.e. be able to enjoy life and have enough left for savings, pension pots, holidays etc).

The remainder of each household volunteers/contributes in the community whatever time they can, and no more (or limited) government budget is spent on care costs. It just needs someone with imagination to start making meaningful changes in how our society looks and functions.

But people will predictably balk because they just don't want to help others. Even if the quality of their life improves. Even if they no longer have to worry about childcare or their own future care needs.

well, you are spouting off about what others should be doing. I am checking what you are doing - maybe leading the way for the rest of us to learn from. I dont mean to be funny but its clear that you have never looked after elderly people or dropped everything to pick them off the floor.

I lost a day of a holiday because Mum fell and we didnt know how serious it was. It was one of many falls that resulted in her having to go into a home.

I missed two plays in London because the sheltered accomendation told me she was very upset about a health issue and could I go round and calm her down.

I’m quite lost for words. I can’t even begin to unpack the stupidity here. I was waiting for the punchline.

My mum's auntie was like another grandmother to us but my grandad explicitly told us not to take on any care roles as she started to become increasingly frail and battling dementia. He said if we did anything once or twice it would very quickly we would become the default. We kept up the social visits but held off anything in the caring roles. She had two sons both selfish and money orientated who had ill treated her for many years, more so following the death of their dad some years earlier. They did the bare minimum and were adamant about not "wasting" money on care. It got to the point that they were leaving her with inadequate food and we were at a loss at what to do. I spoke with Age UK about what to do for the best, they were very clear that no one has an obligation to look after another and her children do not have to provide her with any food. Separate out that it was her children not providing her care and focus on her care needs not currently being met. On the back of this the family submitted an adult social care referral. She had an assessment and it was enough to trigger the sons to put in the care she needed. Being generous to them, maybe they hadn't previously seen what the benefit the carers could have brought and thus they couldn't see whether arranging them would be good for their mother.

We do have to look out for one another BUT sometimes the most helpful thing is not to step in but to take actions and decisions to make others aware of the situation and get sustainable plans put into place.

Yeah, I know. Lots of people like you out there so no way we could have another shift in society and culture.

Oh and also: all I did was describe how the UK looked and worked quite recently (!) - relatively speaking. But yeah, carry on.

What rubbish. In your head maybe. It’s a fantasy. When was this world of one earner supporting a family AND saving AND filling two pension pots AnD having a comfortable life with holidays ever a reality? This was only possible for a tiny number of high earners. The reality is that single income families leave people vulnerable, and yes, let’s say it, that’s generally, not exclusively, but generally women. Not to mention the sheer loss of skills. And what happens to those couples
who have neither children nor elderly parents; the one non-worker is compelled to ‘volunteer’
to care for someone else’s? So a brain surgeon with years of training gets together with a cell biologist with a decade of finely honed research skills who is on the cusp of a key cancer discovery. What do they do - toss a coin to see whether cancer patients or candidates for brain surgery lose out so one of them can go do some voluntary role? Or would one of them continue their role but be unpaid. I’d laugh but views like this are worrying.

@Awkwardisfunny have you read any history? I don't mean the usual crap about kings queens and wars - but about ordinary people?

Women have always worked.

The idea you're spouting about 'how it used to be until recently' is I'm afraid utter utter nonsense. They've worked in factories, scrubbed and cleaned, done domestic labour in larger homes, taken piecework in at home, further back in history we were the original beer brewers, ran the dairy, ran huge parts of the farm, (particularly for farm foul -and the butchery was historically a woman's domain) we were governesses...I could go on.

The word 'spinster' meant a woman who could earn enough money spinning and weaving that she did not need to marry.

You really are spouting something that has been gaining currency on the internet thanks to the bollocks spouted by the Christian Right in the US. And the Christian Right is neither of those things.

And women who couldn’t work had no means to leave abusive relationships (nor support themselves if deserted), no self fulfilment through work and skill development, and often no financial control as after all they weren’t earning the money so their husband got to make the big choices.

it’s like one of those terrible AI generated ‘remember when…’ Facebook videos where the streets are clean, all the children are smiling but there’s a dog walking backwards and all the writing on the signs looks suspiciously Cyrillic.

None of you should be doing this anyway. How do you know the person hadn’t sustained an injury in the fall? You don’t. An ambulance needs to be called each time and this will also trigger a referral to social services who can assess their mobility.

The advice is to call an ambulance. You risk injuring yourself and them if you try and lift them.

We're going to solve the care crisis with volunteers, are we? Why don't we solve the NHS crisis with volunteer nursing assistants too, then? What about cutting local government spending on waste collections, too? If volunteers pitch in to drive the bin lorries and tip the wheelie bins into the lorries, I'm sure borough councils will be able to reintroduce weekly rubbish collections again.

Funny how it's always elder care that people expect others women to do for free...

I agree that there are a lot of charitable community groups and Nice Things™ (Brownies, community reading challenges to encourage children's literacy, toy libraries, knit and natter clubs, drop-in day centres, town choirs, branches of the Townswomen's Guild...) that depend on altruistic unpaid labour, and that the current state of the economy means there are simply not enough of those people around. But! When we talk about the people who need care, they don't only need care between 10am and 2pm, so it's not something that can be fitted in as a voluntary commitment during school hours.

We'll take a detour from the care sector momentarily and consider charitable retail instead. If you were given a charity shop for a year and had to manage a rota full of volunteers without ever having to close early or open late because of lack of unpaid staff to run the shop, you would develop some insight into how implausible your concept is. I'm terminally altruistic, and have been one of those volunteers, by the way! The goal for a manager of a shop is to raise as much money for the charity as possible. This means the shop needs to be open during peak hours when the shopping centre has the most footfall. If you're judging by other non-charitable businesses in the vicinity, who have shareholders to answer to, you'll think the hours should be 9am-5.30pm, Monday to Saturday, with perhaps early closing on Sundays. However, they pay their staff! All my local charity shops are 10am-4pm, because they can't get enough people to consistently volunteer for hours beyond those core hours. They are closed over Christmas and bank holidays, because the volunteers want to be with their families instead of working for free.

Managing a charity shop of volunteers is like herding cats, because the only thing holding them there is a sense of duty and every single one of those people can walk out any time they want. If you make a request they perceive as unreasonable, they can leave. They will often feel entitled to pick and choose what tasks they take on, because they're working for free. If they only want to work on the till, and they don't want to sort through donation bags, separating saleable goods from soiled underwear (yes, people do try to donate faecally soiled underwear) and other unmentionables, then what are you going to do? Well, nothing.

Now let's go back to the care sector, and think about achieving safe staffing ratios for a care home for 24 hours a day, every single day and night of the year. Including Christmas day. On volunteers. It's hard enough to get staff to do waking night shifts when they're paid extra for working antisocial hours. I love my job, I am passionate about care and I have a history of working for free for charity, and not even I would do night shifts for free!

You might be able to talk me into one day a week at the outside because I'm an idiot, but not a single one of my colleagues would be up for our responsibilities as a volunteer. So what happens to the half a million or so people who need 24 hour care?

You can't get volunteers to staff care homes. You can get people to offer low level care to relatives and friends that delays the need for a care home. Fir example helping people get out so dailly slows cognitive decline

have you got validated research for that?