Care Home funding - the basics

[titchy]

Anyone know the basics of what elderly relative has to pay/can claim?

Has carers currently, but now assessed as needing an assisted living place. Have found a care home (not visited due to covid but has decent reputation locally). My god they're expensive aren't they?!!!!

Anyway house on market so presume will have to self fund the lot is that right? Relative currently receives pension and attendance allowance? Will they be able to continue to receive both?

Not what we thought we'd be dealing with a week before Christmas but there you go... Advice gratefully received.

@Mischance

The problem at the moment of course is that your relative cannot visit the home before she goes there because of Covid. And she may find herself isolated in her room for several weeks before she can join in ay activities in communal areas.

Bit of a challenge and very sad.

Yes indeed. She has to isolate for two weeks once she's there. I suspect it's not going to be the panacea she thinks....

It's dh's relative btw hence why I'm not so clued up on everything - but he'd never think about labelling knickers or choosing favourite cushions etc so its really useful to be able to point those things out.

Yes indeed. She has to isolate for two weeks once she's there. I suspect it's not going to be the panacea she thinks....sad

Are the home not offering a test? Our residents are tested monthly and anyone who comes in is isolated and 'barrier nursed' (not as bad as it sounds, it's about PPE which we wear anyway all the time now, but separating laundry, towels, bedding etc and other things to ensure nothing spreads from the room to the home essentially) and then tested as soon as practicable, so the resident can join in, hopefully it will only be until a negative test comes back for isolation in the room.

She'll miss the monthly resident tests so will get the lateral flow (I think ....) that the staff get. But yeah good point, if two lateral flows are negative why the need to continue isolating. One for the list!

A residential home will be cheaper than a nursing home. You can give the home cash each month to buy toiletries and treats. They may also charge extra for the hairdresser, extra entertainment and are often only allocated a certain amount of incontinence pads if she needs them. Clothes often get put into the dryer so maybe buy a size up in case they shrink.

They may also charge extra for setting up a landline phone and ask if she has a tv in her room.

@AlwaysLatte

My stepmother is in a care home as her needs are too great to be at home with us, sadly. Because my Dad co-owns the house with her the money is locked up (as are her personal savings as she has Alzheimer's). So we get an invoice every week which is being stacked up until such time as my dad no longer needs the house (he is staying with us but still likes to go back there every now and then). The bill is currently at about £80,000. She gets excellent care there though, so it's worth every penny. I'm worried about the future though. If my Dad also needs the same level of care in the future but the funds have been depleted would he have to go to an NHS care home rather than a private one? There doesn't seem to be provision for him to hold some funds back for his own care.

Your step mother should only be assessed on her half of the house. They can't take any more than she owns in her own right.

There possibly wouldn't be a charge at all for her if your dad was still living at the house.

I thought if a joint partner still lives in the house then the value of the property is not included in the financial assessment

Don't bring nice cashmere jumpers into the home, chances are it will be too hot for them and they'll just get nicked.
Ditto valuables.

You can get clothing labels made up from the local school outfitters; the Copperplate font is nice.

The whole free NHS Continuing Healthcare is almost a myth and I got the impression that they only dish it out if they think someone isn't going to last long anyway, I mean beyond three months. It goes beyond just nursing care. We got my late mother fast-tracked for it in Epsom General Hospital. Let's just say, after that we could never get that private ward or almost any care home to give her sufficient daily drink and it took a while to suspect it might be deliberate. That continued even after she was taken off free Continuing Healthcare.

No, the State can't touch the house for nursing care if a spouse is living there, or any family member around 60 or over I understand. Any visiting social worker will lobby for them to move/downsize 'Wouldn't you be more comfortable somewhere smaller?' and that's the reason why.

Surrey adult social care is wholly toxic - the sort of culture we have read about tonight at NHS Shrewsbury and Telford Maternity Ward.

Don't trust the CQC reviews of care homes - the CQC is corrupt and sits on bad care home reviews for up to eight months as a cover up. They did that with two care homes my Mum was at - Firtree House in Banstead, Surrey, and Priory Court in West Ewell.

My strongest advice - do not let a parent within sniffing distance of a care home unless they have granted you Lasting Power of Attorney in Health and Welfare. That has to be done when they have mental capacity. It can't be got retrospectively. Get LPA in Finance too, but that in itself isn't enough. Be aware that 'mental capacity' is a flexible term and doesn't mean your parent will need to be ga-ga or not recognise you to not have that.

I had to take two care homes to the local and national press and nobody - I mean nobody - from the Council's Social Services ever contacted me about these stories, despite quotes saying they'd dealt with it. Strictly speaking they didn't need to - as I didn't know to get LPA in Health and Welfare, I wasn't the decision maker in her care despite having all the responsibility. In fact, I wasn't even allowed to read her medical notes until after her death, and it was too late then.

Good luck.

All areas/homes work differently but this is how it is where I am.
Testing. Staff tested weekly and residents monthly by OCT tests, these get sent to the lab. The lateral flow tests are becoming available but it just says whether the person is contagious at that time.

Isolating for 14 days has become normal when first coming into the home. Not ideal, but it stops vivid spreading hopefully. Maybe with the vaccination and the lateral flow tests the requirement to isolate may reduce but it's early days.

Care homes do not provide everything. When assessed for finance if the person has below the 23 k the local authority pays up to a certain amount and the person basically pays all of their pension towards this except for personal allowance I think it's currently £25 let week this if for their clothes, toiletries etc, they aren't left with no money for this.

Top ups- when the local authority is contributing towards the fees the home may charge the relatives a top up fee. Of course you agree to pay this before the person is admitted, can be from £10-£100's per week. Charged for things like bigger room, en-suite, nice view etc.

If your relatives needs increase she may need to move to a nursing home and you could get part/ all of the fees paid (getting all fees paid is unlikely). Some homes offer dual care, nursing and residential but to get the nursing care the person has to be assessed for it.

Incontinence pads -if needed ask if she can be assessed by incontinence nurse (they can then be provided free of charge, but it is the ones assessed for that are provided, I know some ladies like the nice elastic pant style knee-jerk these aren't usually provided.

@AlwaysLatte I agree that they can't take the full cost (unless there's something going on you haven't mentioned) you need to get this looked at.

Should just add - we didn't press for free NHS Continuing Healthcare, the hospital docs offered it; a case of 'beware docs bearing gifts' as it turned out.

Oh my, so we're going to spend Christmas labelling an old lady's knickers Not just knickers - hairbrush, hankies, phone, everything.

I thought if a joint partner still lives in the house then the value of the property is not included in the financial assessment - that is correct. The value of the house and all my savings were totally ignored in my OH's financial assessment by SSD.

The Continuing Health Care funding is indeed a joke. My OH could not have been more disabled, requiring everything doing for him, couldn't even change his position in bed - and add in that he was totally bats - thought people were trying to cut him up and put him down the drain. Apparently he did not qualify! I appealed - after a year (and 10 months after his death) they are just about to hear the appeal over zoom.

@titchy I’d recommend Stikins labels. I use them for DS school uniform and they’re brilliant. They stick on any fabric and don’t come off, wash after wash. They do hard surface ones too which are also hard wearing and don’t come off.

Remember everything needs to be named and no matter how good the home, things will get lost occasionally

This is really important. I got actual sew on name tapes for mum as I felt she’d sewn on enough for me when I was young! Downside was when she died I had just ordered 70 name tapes of her rather unusual name...

Don't bring nice cashmere jumpers into the home, chances are it will be too hot for them and they'll just get nicked.

I don’t think the general experience is that things get stolen, but bear in mind that things washed in the home will be boiled within an inch of their lives so I wouldn’t send anything too fancy. Mum had one or two nice jumpers so I used to take them home and wash them myself, but then I lived round the corner from the home so that was doable.

If she has glasses make sure they are labelled, as they all tend to look very similar and a couple of times I found someone else wearing mum’s. If she gets a new pair you can actually have her name etched on them.

My OH could not have been more disabled, requiring everything doing for him, couldn't even change his position in bed It talks about nursing needs, but what they're actually looking for is the need for nursing decisions throughout the day every day. If the needs are consistent, then in theory anyone could be trained up to fulfil them, and so CHC is not payable.

It's such an unfair system. If you have CHC, then everything is paid for, including your "social" needs. If you don't, then nothing is paid for. It's vaguely assumed you're just needing help for normal everyday living needs and therefore it's only fair that you should pay ... even though few people in the country expect to pay £4000pm on their living expenses.

But there's no great impetus for change because people say "why should I, the taxpayer, pay to protect someone else's inheritance?", and there is validity to that. But by that argument, why should people with CHC funding not have to contribute to their "social costs"? Why should one set of DC have a healthy inheritance and another not, dependent on the pure chance of whether die of heart attack, cancer or dementia?

Sorry, rant over. I'm just incensed that I am likely to be kept alive against my will in a care home, and to add insult to injury, my money will be taken away to pay for it.

Interesting distinction between nursing needs and nursing distinctions.

The rules are in fact needs based - and one aspect in particular is worth remembering: "a well-met need is still a need." In other words if someone is in a good nursing home which is meeting their needs it should not be assumed that they now have no needs. This is where the fight starts.

My OH was in a splendid and very expensive nursing home where his needs were being partially met and assumptions were made that therefore those needs did not exist. This is the basis of my appeal.

Rant away - the whole system is iniquitous and unjust. The government has promised to revamp the system but I wouldn't hold your breath.

Any visiting social worker will lobby for them to move/downsize 'Wouldn't you be more comfortable somewhere smaller?' and that's the reason why.

@NewspaperTaxis I'm really sorry that you've had such a poor experience but I can promise you that when I was a frontline social worker I never suggested to anyone that they should move house in order that the state could grab the equity. I did used to discuss housing options with people but on the basis that a purpose built property might enable them to stay as independent as possible. The vast majority of social workers have the best interests of the people we work with at heart.

@MrsFezziwig

If she has glasses make sure they are labelled, as they all tend to look very similar and a couple of times I found someone else wearing mum’s. If she gets a new pair you can actually have her name etched on them.

Yeah, I found Dad wearing someone else's! What happens is they take them off in the lounge, then forget them, then someone else wanting to put glasses back on picks up the wrong pair ...

The company that comes and does eye tests in the our home automatically engraves the name on the arm, along with whether they're reading glasses or distance.

Don't trust the CQC reviews of care homes - the CQC is corrupt and sits on bad care home reviews for up to eight months as a cover up. They did that with two care homes my Mum was at - Firtree House in Banstead, Surrey, and Priory Court in West Ewell
Sounds like a scandal bubbling under:(

Hi @Yoyoheavho, it depends what you mean by 'scandal', I mean I took the failure of the CQC to the local press back in October 2014 - mainly its failure to make public for 8 months its inspection report of a Surrey care home in Banstead that nearly killed my mother.

The CQC had written up 500 words in the report charting the poor care of a resident who could only have been Mum - the CQC refused to confirm this, again saying that as we did not have Lasting Power of Attorney in Health and Welfare for Sheila, we were not entitled to that information and that is the main purpose of this post really, to reiterate that.

But the CQC did the same thing - sat on a bad report for eight months - with a subsequent care home. TBF, with Covid being ushered into care homes in the last year - again, nary a word of objection from the bent CQC and bent NMC - seemingly to effect a legal cull of the elderly that saves money in pensions and prescriptions - it's.a trifle hard to define what exactly constitutes a 'scandal' - nobody loses their jobs, nobody does time for it, so has it really happened?

Should follow on to @EmmaGrundyForPM - after I took the care home to the local press, Surrey's adult social services joined forces with Mum's subsequent care home - Barchester's Reigate Beaumont - to declare war on us, hitting us - get this - at Christmas, seeing we were barred from giving Sheila food and drink. Arranged to have the police called out me - turns out this is State protocol and hardly unique. Oh, nothing came of it, the police were friendly, but it might have gone the other way.

The role of Social Services in this was hidden from me, until I took out a Subject Access Request on the Council, and they took around 5 months to respond. Then the truth was laid bare. That was after they played the usual trick 'would you like to get your mother back to he family home?' They had no intention of this, but it allowed them to make out you might 'abscond' with your parent from the care home, and allowed them to 'engage' and gather dirt on us - it seems they were trying to obtain the Deputyship on the quiet as a means of punishing me, the whistleblower.

Later - after Mum's death - I found the very same people had secretly sent an email to Surrey Police to try to get me arrested. My crime? To move Mum from the Reigate Beaumont to another care home, thus nixing their plans to fit us up and have me barred.

Those bastards are still in post and no, sorry, I don't trust any Safeguarding head or social worker based on that experience. All our complaints about any care home were ignored.

Oh, also I took it to our local MP Chris Grayling, and he seemed to be playing the same game. The result is my Twitter feed: @GraylingLegacy Later I read the bestseller The Secret Barrister and learned why of all Conservative MPs, Chris Grayling is the last person you should take your problem to is you're any kind of whistleblower.

It's worth pointing out that in seven Surrey care homes I never ever saw the contact details of any Safeguarding head in any of them, they do like to stay off the radar so they can hit you unexpectedly and again, if you didn't know to get LPA in Health and Welfare, they are the decision makers for your parent's care, not you, and these Council workers are toxic, I mean took Mum's story to local and national press, they simply never picked up the phone to get in touch. It doesn't matter if a) You are self-funding or b) Next of Kin, that does not affect the legal situation which is against you if you didn't get LPA. It costs around £80, you go to www.gov.uk or something and you need a signature and witnessed signatures, in the correct order. Do it.

Christ on a bike Newspaper
you've really been through the mill 😟

I would also say cheaper always doesn't mean worse. One grandmother was in a fully funded social services home... it was tatty, a bit smelly and looked pretty grim. She was looked after amazingly by people who genuinely seemed to care . My other grandmother was in a much smarter home, looked beautiful, her care was atrocious.

@MereDintofPandiculation

Oh my, so we're going to spend Christmas labelling an old lady's knickers Not just knickers - hairbrush, hankies, phone, everything.

Definitely - glasses, shoes, slippers, teddy bear. Some of the residents are real magpies (I don't mean in a malicious way). Mum's glasses went missing immediately and I often saw another resident wearing her shoes. I labelled all her clothes but not anything else at the start.