I worked in a home for people with dementia. Some staff were just lazy and would claim to have done a toileting round but not bothered. Others were malicious. I recall one woman being annoyed with an old frail blind man who would ring his bell more frequently than she liked. He has a loose drawer knob, and she switched out his alarm for it. Then she brought people very quietly to laugh at him getting distressed as he pressed the knob and no one came.
I was very young and some of these “carers” were horrible bullies. After reporting things like this a couple of times and being told by the manager “I don’t believe you”, you just tried to compensate for the bad apples as best you could.
The worst thing of all was the manager who did not believe that pain killing drugs were moral and used to ensure shunts were not used other than by visiting medical staff ( is that the name for the things that released drugs at will? This was preShipman). So many distressed people ended their lives in pain, with no understanding of what was happening to them.
There were lots of small acts of cruelty. Even the good home I worked in, which had some amazingly caring staff, had it’s bad apples.
Years later, I worked in a home whilst at uni. It had an elderly white clientele and other than the managers and me was pretty much staffed by British Pakistani teenagers. I’m not racist, but many of the older age group were, which didn’t help staff client relationships, and this is not a job for teenagers on minimum wage. It’s just not. The girls were more interested in sneaking off on train trips to Leeds without their family knowing that doing a good job. I remember doing a handover mid toileting round to a pair of teenagers. An elderly man was with his wife in a room and had soiled himself. The girls stood there arguing over who was going to clean him up because he was “so disgusting, covered in shit”. The man had tears rolling down his face. I sent them out and finished up myself, staying an extra half hour without pay.
I’m sad to say I just found another job. I couldn’t hack it.
I don’t think these were just unfortunate ones offs. Sometimes, when I hear that care these days is done mostly by overseas workers, I hope they might possibly be a little older on average, and sorry to stereotype even positively, but I hope they might be harder working and with a more respectful view of the elderly than the worst staff I worked with.
Kudos to all the amazing carers out there, however old you are and wherever you come from. If you can look after people at their most vulnerable and leave them with a smile, you’ve done something really worth while.