Home Care

[mummyflood]

I'm after some perspective as we are having a few issues with the care agency we have recently engaged for my elderly frail mum, and would appreciate some advice as to whether these issues are common with them all, or whether we have not chosen a particularly good one.

The main issue we have is, over the space of the four weeks since they started, she has had 14 different carers. She has 2 visits a day, seven days a week, with me doing an additional visit every day. She is not particularly happy with this amount - it took a lot of convincing for her to accept carers at all, but she finally accepted the fact that she needed some support after a hospital stay followed by care home respite. Is this a typical number? 9 of these were within the first 10 days, and in the last 10 days or so the office have told us they have had a problem with sickness, which has not only involved office staff themselves having to do visits, but also the timings of the visits have started to slip on some days, anywhere between 45 minutes early to 1hr 10mins late on one occasion. The carer told mum on this occasion that she had a problem with the previous client. However no-one made any attempt to call mum to explain this.

I was expecting a few different faces, obviously it was never going to be only 2 or 3, but 14 seems excessive to me. A couple of them have mentioned high staff sickness levels recently, which I suspect could get worse over the coming weeks if we have a rough winter.

Is this a private care company or a local authority appointed care company?

With private care, it's unusual but does happen occasionally.

With local authority appointed care, it happens a lot.

I'm a carer. Sorry to disappoint but this is very common. Staff sicknesses in our company are very high this time of year. I'm amazed we managed to get to all of the calls. I would still contact the office though and tell them you would like a regular carer asap.

We would aim to cover that sort of package with 4 regular carers so they can build a relationship and the client feels comfortable but most of our clients self fund and we do one hour visits as a minimum

Its self-funded care, but I know two local authorities use them also. The visits are 30 minutes standard, 1 hour for a bath call once a week. At the moment this is enough, as she is reasonably independant although quite frail and becoming forgetful, and it is much a case of a safety call at the beginning and end of each day, with a prompt for her medication both times, a cup of tea, that sort of thing. But I know she would prefer reasonably regular/familiar faces, wouldnt everyone.

So it sounds like this is not out of the norm then...we will have to see how it goes. I have expressed some concern to the office this week, there have been a couple of other issues which they have agreed to rectify, wont go into that as identifying, but at least they are aware I am keeping an eye on it.

I have just cancelled my mum’s carers (well given notice to cancel) as she’s gone down hill and goes into a nursing home next week. Mum has had consistent carers in the morning (subject to holidays etc) but this is because she was happy with an early slot (7am ish) as she’s an early riser. Apparently 8-8.30 am is very busy.

The afternoon slots have been quite random in time and people but I would say around 4-5 people. I think they do the rotas 6 weeks in advance so I would expect it to initially be more people and then settle down

I used to be a home carer and that's the norm unfortunately. We all work different shift patterns so you're more likely to get difficult carers. There's also sick leave (which is high in care workers) and annual leave.