To think carers are classed as unskilled but expected to be skilled when things go wrong.

[JonasBogeys]

Maybe it would be a good time to look at the skill set needed for care work and PAY THEM MORE MONEY.
Most carers I meet through my job seem exhausted by working the amount of hours needed to get by.
They receive inadequate training at times.
They get punched and abused (a lot!)
Is it any wonder things go wrong?

Not where I work no, it's 95% LA funded. No one not even management is highly paid compared to other industries. I could personally get a lot more elsewhere but its a good bunch so I stay. Even the head honcho could get a lot more elsewhere. No one works here for the money.

This 'just pay them more' is really ignorant of market forces driving labour costs. Applies to most social/ tax funded jobs so see similar in schools, hospitals etc. Pay them more from where???

I think they should be paid more.

But low pay can’t be used as a defence if (and I’m talking generally, we’ve no idea what happened in that specific case) they are negligent.

They have different skills and are paid accordingly.

Im also talking theoretically as I work in this field so am playing devils advocate to some degree, but if someone in a coffee shop cant be expected to really do their job, can be neglectful of customers, slouchy, mumbly, forgetful, not that interested and its put down to 'well they're only being paid MW so what do you expect' (which is a narrative I see all the time on here - why does the same not apply to carers?

100% agree with this

Due to voluntary redundancy and the demands of my aging DPs, I changed from a well paid professional career to a part time admin position at near enough minimum wage. But it’s vastly different from what I see the carers at DPs care home or when they were at home having to do. I get tea breaks, basic respect and I don’t have to handle others.
I have options because I have qualifications, am computer literate and speak English well. As far as I can see in the care home, apart from the odd member of staff who appears to have a vocational draw to caring, most are there because they would struggle to get a job elsewhere. Goodness knows where the ridiculous weekly fees go, but maybe it’s ratios they need to demonstrate rather than level of actual caring.

I feel sorry for the carers too, it’s a horrible job if you have not got a calling for it and aren’t well paid. My view is at the care home they could work with less people if they were more highly motivated and indeed better paid.

Seems insane to me that the individuals who care for the most vulnerable in society are paid the worst. Nursery workers too.

I completely agree.

That’s significantly more than minimum wage which a lot of carers are on or close to though.

One of my kids spent years running about the town centre trying to catch a pigeon- the alarm on his face when he did so and didn’t know what to do next was a picture.

As a society we have become medically skilled at keeping people alive, but have no real plan for what to do with them then. More babies survive pregnancy and difficult births than ever. And that is a wonderful gift. But a growing proportion will struggle physically and/or intellectually and we don’t have the will to spend the required resources (or maybe even enough resources full stop) to keep these people safe and happy. Not suggesting nazi death camps, just pointing out that actions have consequences and if we are the nice society that saves babies’lives, we ought to also be the nice society that does whatever it takes to keep people safe, including caring becoming a high-status competitive job.

Going in to care work often gets floated on here as a easy job to get straight in to. It's not for everyone and often doesn't work around family life at all.

I was left in sole charge of 12 teenagers/young adults who Were very very vunerable. Self harming, suicidal, violent doing drugs etc you would count the seconds of your shift and hope no one overdosed or tried to kill themselves. Attacked you or eachother.
It was overwhelming the responsibility. Even the police work in teams.

They couldn't offer me dependable shifts it would be last minute phoned up on the day to come in ,I'd have to try and find childcare. I lost my funded childcare hours because they didn't pay me for 6 months. Only when I handed my notice in they finally got my wages right. The shifts were 7.30am till 5pm so no good either way for school that day or the other shift was 10.30am till 7.30pm so I could do school drop off but not pick up. My school has no wraparound childcare so it became impossible to do long term. I relied on my husband being really flexible which then put his job at risk. Clearly we wasn't going to prioritise a minimum wage job over his higher paid job.

I'd say it was a really specialised skilled job but it's so undervalued and misunderstood by many.

Your school cleaners are astonishingly well paid then. That's nearly 60% more than minimum wage.

We dont have qualifications for some of the skills needed. Society as a whole struggles to quantify soft skills and put a qualification framework in place for them. We see it as personality, not something that can be measured or taught or assessed. But the reality is that we want empathetic, patient, responsive reliable people and not all people have those attributes and employing people without them is dangerous gor the person being cared for.

Also we lot do have the care specific qualifications

And there isnt an exact correlation between qualifications and pay anyway, otherwise all the highest earners would have phds and thats not the case at all.

Indeed. But that can be changed

@Swiftie1878except they’re not. Look up care positions in your area, see what they’re paying.

It’s because they’re jobs mainly done by women. And we know that’s not valued in society.

Of course they are allowed to bring things back in house - they choose not to as that would mean higher wages on LA pay scales with unions to negotiate with. But all that may be changing soon as new legislation comes in. This may mean more pay for care workers but it will mean everyone paying more council tax so those of you on this thread saying 'pay them more' I assume you'll be happy with that?

I know what they pay - friends run a care company franchise.
There’s a difference in pay depending on the type of ‘care’ provided.

My sister has permanent wrist damage. She’s always scratched in the part of her neck, huge nail trails, she adores her clients, she works on a dementia ward.
A huge problem how easy it is to get a job in care, you’ll get people doing it just for the hourly rate. I see carers all the time on their phone, ignoring the client, it attracts people who don’t care. The training should be made harder and more often, build the skills but also weeding out the crap ones. The scratching lady is the main culprit, her daughters insist she has nails manicured not cut back.

She’s saying she gets paid 20 pence per hour more than the cleaners, not £20 per hour

Social care budgets are really screwed. Just my county spent 20m over budget last year on adult social care

Something needs to drastically change but currently the pressure is on to spend less money on social care not more

This results in people ending up with care that is cheap in the short term, but expensive in the longterm for example people not having 2:1 when needed, being placed in less supported care than they need. I could count hundreds of cases from my own nhs experience where people are given care packages that dont meet their needs that wind up being really costly, when they wind up in hospital or placements breakdown.

Because the spending is so limited, often people are put in incorrect placements or given really optimistic statements of their needs to care homes etc.

Then the care homes staff that assess often do so to fill a bed, rather than because they are truly the right home. Often people are accepted to live their by someone who will never be involved in their care

The system is a mess

And controversially but not controversial in my opinion

Poor working conditions means a lower quality of staff. Often people dont enjoy their jobs, have been assaulted a few too many times. Lots of people didnt want to work in care in the first place but it was a job that was hiring.

There are a small portion of people that stay working in care where it's truly a vocational. A big chunk of people who have the right caring personality, get too burnt out by not being able to give the care they want to. They end up trying to pull the weight of vacancies, and for the burnt out or poor staff. A big portion of them either become the burnt out staff themselves or leave creating the vacancy

She’s saying she gets paid 20 pence per hour more than the cleaners, not that she gets paid £20 per hour

I'm not convinced it will mean more CT when private companies have a profit imperative

Either way. I 'm not personally opposed to more CT as we all benefit from good public services

I agrer with op.My husband used to be a support worker for adults with autism. It was care in the community at it's most basic, trying to card for people who couldnt live at home with multiple needs including toileting, feeding and speech issues.
He was paid min wage for this work while dealing with colleagues from other countries who spoke pidgin english and didnt want to be in the job, just sat on their phones all day calling their families and complaining about the job they were being paid to do and a manager who was running 6 other houses.
Yes, it would be great if there was more money in the collective pot with better training, safe guarding for everyone including staff but there isnt due to budget constraints and the way some companies work to pay higher up management like CEO etc.
It is a sad way that the world of business is run and due to his mental health, my husband no longer works as a support worker.

No one wants to do it, the pay is low and often you are at risk of injury, so the only people who take it up are either truly wonderful compassionate people, in it for the right reasons, or those who just need an unskilled job for money and that’s the only type of available job around.

Two opposite ends of the spectrum. The ones who care and are good at their job, get more and more responsibility and are often given the more difficult cases as they do it without complaining- until it gets too much for them and then they leave. It’s a vicious circle and I’ve seen it happen time and time again.

The ones who don’t care, aren’t any good anyway.

I don’t know what the answer is.

Edited to add in the time it took to write this post, the post underneath it has proved my point where the posters husband has left for his own mental health.