To wonder what can be done to alleviate the care home corruption described in this article?

[Carla786]

My DGM is 93 and luckily still has fairly low care needs which my DM manages at home. The private carers the council offered ended up being unhelpful so she prefers to do it on her own - it's difficult but manageable. A lot of my DGM's friends are in much worse positions in care homes, and I've been trying to find out why care homes are in such a bad state for a while.
Obviously there's a lot of reasons, but from this book extract in the Guardian it sounds like private equity is a big part of the picture.

AIBU to wonder what can be done? This has to be tackled, but how?

https://www.theguardian.com/society/2026/mar/28/the-great-care-home-cash-grab-how-private-equity-turned-vulnerable-elderly-people-into-human-atms

Thanks for posting this.
The first thing is that younger people need to be aware of what is going on. The decision to go into a care home is made either: by the elderly person themself at a point where they feel vulnerable and may have fluctuating capacity; or by relatives at a point of exhaustion; or by overworked social workers with a caseload of neglected elderly people.
Who pays? The old people themselves out of their pensions or house sale proceeds; the council taxpayers. None of them are in a good position to question and challenge the accounts.
The quality of care can be awful, and if so, who challenges it and how? The management may treat the resident worse if he or she raises concerns. For relatives, it can feel like a hostage situation. Leaving a care home is expensive and difficult- where would you go? With fees around 1500 a week, a month's notice can be over 6000.
It is compounded by feeling grateful to staff who have done their best in difficult circumstances. Elderly people need so much care, if they are fed, washed, dressed, given medicine, that is so much work, but still more care may be needed. A person is not a pot plant. If they call for assistance and no-one comes, they can feel totally isolated.
The bit in the article at the end about nice food and fancy curtains actually annoyed me. I visit my relative in a care home where an old man constantly calls "help, help" and no-one answers (except me, which is all kinds of problematic); where another wanders the corridors, bored out of his mind but unable to speak. The design of the curtains doesn't have a major impact on their quality of life.

I have some insight into this (not prepared to say how) and, while some of the detail isn’t quite right, the broad thrust of what is described is spot on. Some sectors shouldn’t be run for profit, it just doesn’t work. When MIL needed to go into a care home I was adamant that she wasn’t going into one owned by private equity, and I pulled accounts and companies house records for the homes we looked at to make sure of it.