Help with finding care home etc

[Makemedoit]

Hi. I gave been advised on Chat to come to this board for help and advice. I have lots of questions!

I need to start trying to find a care home for my mum who has dementia. She lives in Wales and I am 3 hours away and can't visit at the moment.

So where do I start?

How does the financial side work?

How can I sort out POA which has got my wrong address etc on

Where can I get a bit of a hand hold?

Are you looking near you or in Wales?
Care quality commission inspection reports are a good place to start- but word of mouth is the best way.... local Facebook/ gp surgery/ local contacts.
Carers association can offer help and support.
Not sure about wales but she should have a social worker? Contact adult social services at county council ( in England) via website- may have phone lines to help.
Keep posting... lots of experts who are battle scarred on here. 🌺🌺

It will be in Wales.
Yes hoping social services will help me through it

Contact the social services for the area your mum lives in and ask for an assessment for her. You can be involved by Zoom or similar.

However if she will be a self funder (am not sure of Welsh threshold but think is £40k savings) she would be funding herself so you can skip SS if you wanted.

Sorry to hear about your mum. Where is she at the moment. Do you already have poa for her and does she still have mental capacity to make decisions around her care. Whats the situation with her house, its a minefield but there is some excellent advice given here.

You need to contact both adult social services and nhs continuing care (I'm presuming it's called the same in Wales) as both offer funding and have different criteria (nhs is not means tested but threshold is different). Once she is assessed and hopefully accepted she needs residential care that's funded they should give you a list of suitable care homes in the area they cover, typically the county.

Once you have the list you will need to call them to see if there's space, and what the "extras" charge is which can be considerable. The cqc has rankings and you can see where their shortcomings are but talking to the manager is just as useful I found. It's not easy from afar even before covid, so all you can do is use your judgement.

As far as poa you need to contact them and change the address!

Thank you some great advice.

She does not own her house bit rents from the council and only has a few thousand in savings.

Am waiting for some one from SS to ring me back and gave asked for a phone call from her GP as well.

Her carers had to report a safety incident today so this should help her cause.

She isn't really capable of making decisions any more unfortunately.

Yes will get onto the POA stuff tomorrow as well

Have you already got POA registered? Do you think she needs a formal capacity assessment from the gp. I would ask the care manager and gp to assess her care needs so that she can get the right sort of carehome and ask social services to recommend the good homes in her area. Where abouts in Wales will you be looking? someone here might know of some good places. Would you like to ask if she can move somewhere nearer to you, that might be a possibility.

www.carehome.co.uk/care_search_results.cfm/searchcountry/Wales/searchchtype/local-authority

My parents were self funding so we looked at homes in the area and chose the one that we liked the best. You get a good feel from looking round, chatting to the carers and manager. The place we chose was hands-down the best one for my mum and dad (both needed to go in at the same time).

Try asking around as well, if you know anyone else in the area. Word of mouth is good.

I'm not sure whether you get the same choice if you're not self-funding though. In my experience the Social Worker was keen to wash her hands of it but I kept involving her, said I needed support etc, and pressed her to help. They should really work through it with you but (some) can be quick to try and wash their hands of it if they think you can manage.

Age UK has very good fact sheets on finding care homes, financial side of things, list of questions to ask the homes etc. Unfortunately, doubt you can visit them in person at the moment.

Care homes: quality of facilities and decoration is less important than quality of staff, though at the moment an en-suite toilet is quite handy.

There was a report published yesterday on Covid outbreaks and care homes, linking things such as size of home to likelihood of outbreak (don't know whether large was good or bad) - if you can find that, it might be worth a read. Though if she's in Wales, maybe less of a worry - most areas of Wales seem to have much lower levels than most of England.

Remember any freedoms for your mum (to go to bed when she wants, get up when she wants, wander along the corridors) will be extended to other residents. If you want your mum to be able to walk along to the lounge wen she wants, you'll have to accept other residents with dementia wandering around too.