To think pay in care homes is scandalous

[Clappingforjoy]

I've worked in then and got out of it. Understaffed rushed off your feet. Rude management and simply unable to give the elderly the care they deserve.

Care home staff are appallingly paid. The ones who are good at their job are absolute saints.

As for “frittering away children’s inheritance” - it’s not their inheritance, it’s my money. My parents’ money wasn’t “frittered away”, it bought them decent quality of life, safety, warmth, decent food and great care. In other words, it was used for the exact purpose intended from a life time of saving.

How do you know what goes on when you are not there

You can tell by seeing how residents who don’t have visitors are treated, talking to other residents’ relatives and, most important, how your relative responds to the staff. My mum was treated like a queen to her last breath. Five of the staff even came to her funeral.

I work in an end of life nursing home it is always short staffed, they use a lot of outside staff, these people do not know the residents so that’s not good.Bells very often don’t get answered until they go into emergency. Poor pay and hard work.

Sorry to hear that @Nipie, I guess we were very lucky.

Very unfortunate the way how care staff get treated within the sector, starting from management, some family members and underpaid. The role itself is very tiring and not being accepted and acknowledged makes it worse. It should be classified same as a skilled job with bands just like nursing. Nurses can not work without HCA / Support Worker, and in most cases healthcare assistants perform more duties than nurses, ie obs, personal care, data entry/daily report update, assessments, reviews, just to mention a bit. This has to be taken more into consideration with the Health Secretary and acknowledge what we do out there. Management doesn't realise that having happy staff makes life easy for the smooth operation of the organisation, in most cases managers are very mean to care staff very rude not forgetting that when CQC comes the same care staff will not even bother to support them but to have the opportunity to say it all and whistleblowing. I have been in the industry for over 10 years now focusing more into self employed and private clients with my own small team of professional carers who love what they do most, enjoying their hard work results be it money and also be part of the family. This topic touches my heart so deep.

I think that, at some point, they'll need to bring in assisted dying. Not everyone can afford, or wants to end up in a care home as the cheaper ones tend to be terrible places. Savings soon run out unless you're very wealthy and non council funded clients pay more in fees anyway. This model is unsustainable as the non wealthy boomers start to age and won't be able to afford care.

I've worked in care homes for over 25 years and I've never worked in one that I'd want to spend as much as a week in. The carers have no time to spend with a resident and it's usually a case of shoveling it in one end and cleaning up at the other. No time for a proper break, no proper sick pay, complaining relatives, no thanks, injuries and poor pay is their lot.

Homes are very cynically run just to keep CQC happy - what goes on behind the scenes is never seen by them. I could write a book.

Some posher places might be okay, but there are non of those in my neck of the woods.

Nurses can not work without HCA / Support Worker, and in most cases healthcare assistants perform more duties than nurses, ie obs, personal care, data entry/daily report update, assessments, reviews, just to mention a bit.
Whilst this is true in the NHS (where pay is considerably better than the private sector) that has not been the case in any care home I've ever worked in. I did HCA work for 7 years before doing my nurse training and my experience was of doing personal care, toileting and feeding in a depressing conveyor belt. The nurses did all the documentation and obs etc. When I did work as a senior in a residential home I did assessments and care plans but these were simple and largely generic because we were never trained to do it any other way.

The sad fact is that most care work comprises of unskilled work that requires very little training to do. That's why job centres push anyone into it. , which is very unfortunate for those who require care because whilst taking someone to the toilet and feeding them requires very little skill... doing it well with compassion, empathy and patience takes a great deal of skill that many people do not have.

YANBU. I work in a care home. Not as a carer. But residents are paying at least 1000 a week. Carers are on minimum wage. The staff turnover is high. Mainly carers from Eastern Europe who frankly don't have a clue as they can't recruit staff from UK. If the families could see how little care Thier relatives get they would be shocked. But most off the families never come.

I hope I'm brave enough to top myself around 75/80 if I'm still alive and sound of mind etc. I don't want my children watching me rot in a care home with dementia. And I want to die knowing I've left them an inheritance and good memories of their mum instead of all the depressing shit that comes with the very elderly.

Agree assisted dying needs to be looked at.

Assisted dying is all very well but you have to have capacity to consent to it. It wouldn’t help anyone with dementia.

Yes it would have to be something you formalised before you got diagnosed.
More and more people dying of dementia now as we are living so long. I bet there would be a huge number of people who
Would want
To have a preemptive assisted dying arrangement in place.

@myusernamewastakenbyme I'm sorry ... So sad to lose both parents so young.

You can’t do it pre-emptively in case the decision you made when you were compos mentis isn’t the one you make once you’ve developed dementia. I intend to have an advance directive that any conditions that develop after a dementia diagnosis are to go untreated. That’s as far as you can go, unfortunately.

@Alsohuman I understand the ethics etc are extremely complex. It's so sad though when you wouldn't let a pet go through it, and there's nothing we can do for our own human relatives to stop their suffering.

I know. Watching my mum gradually disappear broke my heart.

If only there was enough time to interact with the old people at least because some are lovely.
Terrible shame.
I have seen so many needs overlooked and you can see they dont get proper care but the staff are so pushed which is awful because alot of the staff are really nice to the old people.

@Alsohuman sorry about your mum x

Thank you so much @hereforasillygoosetime, that’s very kind of you. It will be four years in November since she died and I now remember her as she was when she was before she was ill.

"Frittering away inheritance" - this attitude is a massive part of the problem. People don't want to pay for care. They want to hoard their money to pass down to their children. God Forbid their wealth gets shared out. A lot of families do anything and everything to avoid paying for care including phoning carers directly and claiming their relative has extra calls in place (this genuinely happened to me one night shift), taking on some aspects of care themselves to lower bills even when they can't physically provide the care forcing carers to chose between working through their break to carry out the care the family takes charge of or leaving the resident without food/clean laundry/clean living space etc, point blank refusing to accept when their relative needs more care and fighting care workers every step of the way when they push for more care to be put in place.

Part of this is caused by the lack of respect for care workers. No, you don't need special training to take someone to the toilet but to do it while offering care, respect and dignity to the elderly resident takes a special kind of person. You do need training to recognise a UTI, which could be life threatening to an elderly person, you need special training to recognise sepsis, pneumonia and other ailments that commonly present in the elderly. You need special training to administer controlled medication, you need special training to use the lifting equipment and to recognise when it's not safe to use. amd so on.

Caring is not an unskilled job. Carers aren't given the training they need but that doesn't mean it's unskilled and the longer you're a carer the more adept you become at recognising when a resident needs medical attention or extra support. Care will never improve until the wage goes up and the profession is given the recognition it deserves as the staff turn over will always stay too high to properly train staff.

@Frequency what is the answer though, increase gov funding enormously? (There are only so many with wealth to pay for their own care anyway and this will massively decrease with the next generation)....isn't it a bit of a bottomless pit like the NHS (massively under the strain of elderly care as well)

I work for the NHS but visit residential and nursing homes regularly in my role.
There is just one that I would consider properly caring and it isnt a posh 4k a week one either, (just the standard 1k!) When I visited unannounced last week, 2 young carers had most of the residents watching Mama Mia and were dancing and singing along with them.
Made my heart jump for joy!
In my experience most people with dementia are not distressed and can enjoy life.
That said my own Mum lives with my sisters family, if she wasnt living with my sister she would be living here with my family.
Hell would freeze over before she went to a care home.

I don't know what the answer is but I do know the care industry cannot carry on as it is.

The idea of a right to leave or receive inheritance needs to change, even without the needs of the care industry wealth needs to be redistributed instead of hoarded. And I don't doubt that there is more money available for the NHS and for care in the government's pot but they chose to spend it elsewhere - Brexit, for example, which has cost billions so far and for what?