Real life example of balancing rights - interested in opinions

Quite.

Again. The option you are offering is to water down their request. Which means no confirmed same-sex care. Why should they?

There are non-compatible competing "needs" here.

Also many social care agencies are recruiting overseas staff, often from developing countries where there is no comparable system of criminal record checks. So there’s that.

I am shocked that some posters can't see that having males doing intimate care for women who can't consent is a safeguarding failure.

And whatever CCTV or whatever OP thinks is protecting her sister will not do so, all the staff will know exactly where it does and doesn't cover, no one is going to watch it 24/7 and it's hardly going to be focussed on residents bodies when being bathed or changed.

You do realise that an anaesthetist in South America was caught on CCTV orally raping women while they were having C-sections? So while being recorded and with several medical professionals in the room? Or Dr Myles Bradbury in the UK, sexually abusing children with cancer with their parents in the room just the other side of a paper curtain? Male carers overnight unchaperoned could so, so easily abuse residents in this set up. And no , NAMALT, but some are and we should do everything to make it more difficult for the possibility to even arise.

https://edition.cnn.com/interactive/2017/02/health/nursing-home-sex-abuse-investigation/

This is also relevant.

A second male member of staff wouldn't be a suitable chaperone for a man doing personal care on a female service user, so if no female staff were on site, then it must have been unchaperoned.

One of the roles of a chaperone is to make the service user/patient feel more secure during an intimate examination or care to intimate areas. Two fully dressed male carers looking at my private area would be more intimidating than one man, not less.

@TheCourseOfTheRiverChangedthe OP didn’t say it wasn’t chaperoned, only there wasn’t other female staff present.

@Gandalfatemyhamster no male carer who was good at what he did would provide unchaperoned intimate care to a female service user. No reputable service provider would permit it. Industry wide policy standards don't.

This is the key point.

Ultimately the other family has a right to single sex care and your sister has a right to care but not necessarily more than that in terms of who provides it as long as it's of an adequate standard that meets certain basis standards.

So it's not a balancing of right going on here.

There's the rights of the other disabled person and the preferred care options of your family.

One is a right and needs and the other is a want and desire.

Thanks for that report, @busybusybusy2015

Grim reading.

That's horrifying, but sadly doesn't surprise me.

Disability News Service, run by John Pring, used to do a lot of research into this, though I haven't kept up with it.

Gandalfatemyhamster

A DBS just means not-caught-yet. It's not a certificate of sainthood. I mean, I have one.

Also, I hate to say this, but some care providers do basically employ anyone off the street...

@DuchessofReality it’s a good question re the right to same sex care. I think it would come under the patient being treated with dignity and respect guidelines or something like that. It absolutely should be a ‘right’ in my opinion. Would like to know the answer.

The OP has left, so won't be clarifying exactly what's going on with staffing, but I have the idea that the home has no staff on permanent nights, and just relied on daystaff taking overtime?

If so, then the male day staff are presumably still getting their contracted hours, so I'm not sure where protecting their income comes into it. There's no right to overtime. (The fact that wages in the care sector are so low that people are willing to take overtime is another issue.)

If the nights are being staffed by bank staff, as opposed to agency, I'd ask if the rotas are being done so that one long-term staff member is on shift with the newer staff member. I'd also ask if these staff were being given day shift opportunities so they could get to know the service users then.

And if it's agency instead of bank, I'd want to know the plans to reduce their reliance on agency!

@Circumferences Jimmy Saville was NOT a healthcare professional, he was a celebrity given unrestricted access due to his celebrity. Please don’t use him as an example of someone abusing vulnerable patients when he was not working in a health and social care setting. It’s not the same.

I’m sorry but are we really going down the route of no male health and social care professionals allowed anywhere? These aren’t Tom, Dick or Harry off the street, these are qualified members of staff with DBS’s. I work with men day in and day out in social care and they are just doing a job. If we don’t trust men to do their job then where does it end? No male nursery staff? No male nurses?
Of course the other resident is allowed to request personal care from same sex staff, but at the same time the care home can say they can’t meet need. In the same way that if I ask for a package of care for a sexually inappropriate man with dementia and ask for male only staff, 80% of care agencies will say they can’t meet that need as they have mostly female staff on their books.
This isn’t hospital, these are small care homes working with the limited staff they employ. Maybe the care home were greedy and didn’t fully consider the impact on the other residents? You’re allowed to be sad, OP, if your sister has built up relationships with the male staff. I have seen some beautiful professional relationships between male staff and female clients. They’re not all predators.

Neither you nor I are privy to enough detail to make such a claim. This is a specialist unit for such profoundly disabled people that they are unlikely to express any opinion on the matter of same sex care at all, but the OP is of the view that, to the extent that her daughter can express an opinion, her favourite staff are men. She is worried that one new patient will result in policy changes that cause her daughter’s favourite staff to leave. Open and transparent communication is always the best way of laying everything out and resolving problems to everyone’s satisfaction.

The 'consequences' are making all of the female residents safer and protecting both the male staff and the company from allegations of abuse.

No woman, or person acting on behalf of a vulnerable woman, should have to justify or prove to others why she needs and deserves the protection of same sex care. It's profoundly depressing that you think they should.

No. New resident's family should meet existing residents' families and frank conversations about the consequences of their request should be possible. At the moment they are making a request without full knowledge of the consequences.

Literally the only reason why same-sex intimate care is an urgent consideration, is because too many men in positions of "care" have taken advantage of vulnerable women when they're naked. It's all on record and women know this (cough -Jimmy Savile -uncough ) .

It's up to care providers to provide safe care. It's not up to women to request it.

To clarify what you're saying here: new resident mist accept itiate care from a man, against her will, because... why?

OP, if you want practical advice on this situation and since you say the single-sex care point isn’t the main issue, you might want to post on the Special Needs boards for advice.

I think the reason posters picked up on the sex-based rights point was because of the way your OP was framed and the fact you posted in FWR asking for opinions.

Good luck with it all, and I hope you manage to find a workable solution for your sister - staffing is such a huge issue in this sector and, regardless of our differing opinions on some issues, I think we can all agree that it’s a travesty that so many disabled people receive such shockingly inadequate care for their needs as a result of underfunding.

If you move her somewhere else, do make sure to ask about the alternate provider's staff turnover rate. Ask how many of the staff have been working for the service for under a year.

If we can't get them to allow mixed overnight staffing we may have to look at moving her, which would be very sad. I understand in any case we may not be able to move her as her social worker is the decision maker, not us.

Given that you attribute your sister's unhappiness to changes in staffing during the night shifts, I am unsure that the key will be to move her to a totally new facility. Her staff at night would still be unknown to her, and then she'd also be coping with a complete change of physical environment and totally new day staff as well.

You said that the overnight shifts are being filled by bank staff. Where I work, bank staff are people who have been interviewed and employed by the same manager as me, but who couldn't commit to fixed hour contracts, e.g. because of their own caring responsibilities at home. Our long-term bank staff are as familiar to our service users as full-time employees with similar lengths of employment.

Can you clarify whether the facility is using regular bank staff or agency staff? If it is regular bank staff, then the staff should be gradually building trust with all the service users, including your sister. That would re-establish stability.

I think you need to ask to meet with the manager, and explain that you're concerned about the emotional impact of unfamiliar staff in the night. Ask them what plans they have to recruit permanent staff for the nights, and ask them how long the current bank staff have been working there.