“Wow you are all harsh! Would it really be so hard to pop in and say hi every now and again?“
As someone who worked in elderly care and had/has several elderly and infirm relatives that’s an incredibly ignorant, naive and judgmental comment to have made.
It’s really not that simple and actually TOO many people being involved in someone’s care can and does lead to things being missed because “everyone thought somebody else did x” in most cases the care needs to be properly organised and administrated in order to prevent that.
Very common eg for elderly and cognitively impaired people to end up with accidental med overdoses because too many people are “helping” and records not being kept and next thing they’ve got a paracetamol od!
Can also lead to them NOT being checked on often enough because lack of organisation means all involved thought eg tue wasn’t my turn...
It really is better if care at home is managed professionally rather than ad hoc.
When my gran was near the end and had dementia as part of her ill health we organised ourselves as a family via a Facebook messenger group so EVERYONE saw the messages when say someone had said they couldn’t do wed due to a Drs appointment of their own can someone else step in - so we ALL knew who had volunteered to cover/swap and indeed if nobody stepped up straight away there’d be discussion to organise so somebody did and nobody had the excuse of ‘well nobody told me’
Avoided “hurty feelings” nonsense too to be honest because actually most of the time severely we’re happy to step in if someone couldn’t do a day but gran felt overwhelmed if there were too many visitors.
It also sounds like this lady would greatly benefit from a personal alarm system which several of my relatives have.
The carer has NO business approaching effectively a stranger and asking them to step in!
Aside from the presumptuousness - and I’m SURE this isn’t the case - but for all the carer knows you and the neighbour may have had a falling out, you could be someone unsuitable to be involved in such a situation (carer must surely be aware of elder abuse and how the elderly are targeted by con artists and thieves!) so she could be putting her client in harms way!
As I said I definitely don’t believe it to be the case here from how you’re coming across but the carer absolutely doesn’t know that.
“but I think it's coming from a place of caring about what happens to the neighbour so I wouldn't judge her too harshly.”
I wouldn’t necessarily assume so. As I said I worked in this area for many years and just as in any job there are those who really shouldn’t be doing the job unfortunately and in recent years that problem has been increasing.
If the carers are meant to be in daily then it’s entirely possible the carer messed up! And she’s trying to prevent getting caught out again! So her actions could be entirely self serving.
“Why would you complain ?”
Because it was rude, unprofessional, inappropriate and could potentially put the client at risk by involving them with people who haven’t been checked who may take advantage of or even hurt them!
Bloody good reasons to complain in my opinion!
“Secondly I used to help an elderly neighbour and his children took major issue with it and accused me of trying to steal their inheritance.” Another good reason - getting involved in such a situation without clear professional protections is foolish.
If the carer thinks the client needs closer monitoring she should be organising that within the family and with social care agencies/companies not some random that just happens to live in the same street!
“What possible good will come out of you complaining?”
If the carer has failed to alert her bosses, the family and other agencies that the client needs more care than she’s getting a complaint will enable this to be flagged, if it was her cock up led to the client being left 28 hours then it could lead to this being flagged too.
Social care is in crisis we know this but quite honestly with 3 grown children this lady shouldn’t really not be getting decent care.