Cost of private at-home carers

[Delphigirl]

Hi my mum has dementia and has been managing to live independently, with some help from a companion an hour or so a day, but she is now becoming much more confused and neglecting her personal care, housekeeping etc so we are meeting a care agency with a view to putting in some care to manage housekeeping, personal care assistance and companionship, for a good few hours a day. She is privately paying and can afford it.
I have no idea what the likely hourly costs are for daytime care of this nature and so I have no way of judging the prices we are offered. Can anyone give me a ballpark range? We are in oxford so assume higher rather than lower (I understand Oxfordshire has the highest care home rates in the country, for example).
Also are there any top questions I should be asking the care coordinator? This is all totally new to me.
Many thanks

ThNk you very much. Particularly for the Herbert protocol and this is me forms @BunnyRuddington - never heard of either - and the Extra Help recommendation @MrsPelligrinoPetrichor (great name btw!). In fact to everyone, I am learning a lot from this thread and I am extremely grateful

Will she need a capacity assessment to agree to carers, visits, assessments and paying for any care. Does anyone have p.o.a.

@BunnyRuddington yes it does. So as a POA holder you can make the decision as to what is needed but the Court has to authorise it to make it legal. Community DoL is a fairly recent thing in comparison with the DoLS that anyone who lacks capacity should have in a care home. It’s fascinating stuff (if you’re a geek like me).

South east we pay £27 an hour for my parents one hour six days a week.

Dbs vetted cleaner housekeeper was £15 (recommended as very good with elderly clients) personal care is around the same price an hour if you can hire privately, twice as much through an agency. Get a social services needs assessment ideally and check for partial funding

Try a cleaner first, it's cheaper

I took on a cleaning job for a lady in her eighties with dementia. It got incredibly tough to manage her and clean her house, in fact almost impossible. Some days she would be very agitated, need lots of help with tasks, sometimes she would strip naked, she was forgetting to eat, occasionally accusing me of moving her possessions and desperately lonely and needy of my time.

It's a lot to ask of a cleaner who isn't trained/insured to provide care and is on £12 an hour. Her adult son has now arranged carers to come in twice a day after I told him I would have to leave.

I'm glad you're looking at arranging care for your mother Op and I agree that it's best to use an agency who'll provide the same staff, so that your mum will become familiar with the same routine and faces.

Sorry you're in this situation, it's really tough