Carers charging for 30 minutes but only working 15-20 minutes - is this normal for care?

[ImissSpangles]

I am not sure if this is a normal thing to expect from care or not.

Mum lives with my dad, she has dementia and is incontinent. Last year we employed a team of carers to help mum.

They are all self employed but work together as a team, so not an actual care company. In retrospect we absolutely should have gone with a company because things can often become a bit too fragmented for my liking, for example I have to pay everyone individually, they insist on being paid weekly, I would have preferred monthly but they don't want that. Tbh, we had to rush about finding these carers a year ago after mum had come out of a long hospital stay and the NHS discharge carers let us down. It was all frantic at the time and very stressful. Looking back at it all a care company would have been a much better fit.

Anyhow, the carers come three times a day, around 9.30am to get mum up, put on the loo and showered/dressed, then again after lunch for a toilet break and again at 7pm to put mum to bed. They come in pairs and charge £26 per hour and £20 per half hour. This is 7 days a week.

However, they will often only do 15-20 minutes during the afternoon and evening visit and will round their charge to the nearest half hour. I am usually at my parents for the afternoon visit and I have never known them to ever do a full half hour.

I have no idea if this is normal practice for carers? I asked on a Subreddit and was piled upon by some people saying that it's poor enough money as it is and the carers have to consider travel expenses etc. I am a self employed cleaner and when I tell my clients that I am doing an hour, I will do the full hour, I have also incorporated the cost of my travel into my fee as this isn't my clients concern (and my fee is a lot less than the carers).

Does anyone else have private carers for a parent and do they do this? Maybe it is normal, I honestly don't know?

We use a care company. They stay for the full hour we pay for - shower, dress, breakfast, make beds, put washing on and put clothes away if time. I tried to get self employed carers due to cost but they either didn't turn up or were unreliable. It's not easy!

Yes it is dreadful.

Their pay is very low and I gather they don’t get paid for travelling between appointments so are likely just trying to keep on schedule.

You can ask them in a kind way, rather than in a not getting full value way, whether they have enough time to do everything they see could be done. Offer to pay for longer and see how they feel about that ?

you might still not get the last ten minutes but you will be loosing a smaller percentage of the overall time.

I am embarrassed to admit that we did no research on them at all, they are all local and it was a kind of 'friends of a friend' situation. They told us they are all insured and have up to date DBS and we have taken their word for it.

In our defense, we were in a zoned out bubble at the time. The fall mum had taken was quite severe, she had split her head open, fractured her hand and dislocated her knee. She had sustained an odontoid peg neck fracture and we were told by orthopaedics that most elderly people with osteoporosis and cancer, as mum sadly has, won't fully recover and are likely to die but here she still is, she is as strong as an ox. Her hospital stay was dire and I had to be her voice and advocate for her all the time, there is never any continuity of communication on hospitals wards (mum also had another stay this Jan which was an absolute nightmare). Mum was bedbound and couldn't communicate at all when she was discharged, we genuinely thought she had only weeks left and we just got in the care we could after the NHS discharge care had let us down.

Obviously, hindsight is a great thing and if I knew then what I know now I would have done things so differently but it is hard for me as my dad is 85 and gets confused easily and my sister will often just put her hands up and say she doesn't understand so will be no use so everything regarding my parents wellbeing is often down to me to deal with. I have my own issues and am down for a hysterectomy in October, God only knows how they will cope but my dad and sister seem to believe that I will be back on my feet within a few weeks.

This is why I have arranged for SS to come. I want things set in place in case my surgery doesn't go to plan.

At £26 per hour, per carer I don't think that's too bad, I don't get paid anywhere near that hourly rate.

They don't use any of their own equipment or PPE, we even supply their gloves.

You did the best you could do at the time. We are all just learning and adapting as we go. We were with social services which I found helpful especially as things progressed to no longer being suitable for home care. Good luck

I've commented on your other thread OP, thought I recognised your story.

Please call them out on it. I worked for a care company and we had to dial into a number off the clients phone to say we'd arrived and then dial out as we left. If we didn't stay at least 25 minutes we would be asked why. And it worked both ways - if we were regularly going over time on 2 carer visit, it was clear that not enough time was being allowed.

Private carers should be allowing travel time in between the visits. It sounds like your family is being taken advantage of, sadly.

Do you have any sort of written contract with these people? What notice period do you need to given if/when you change to other carers? I wouldn't get rid of them until something else is sorted and in place.

Just thinking about this £26 for two people for an hour diesnt even ci er minimum wage, NI and pension. I'd say i am happy to pay more but say I want the full time covered.

It is really normal to change care companies. I like the idea of a kind of cooperative carer company but not if they’re going to reproduce all the worst aspects of private care provision. Presumably they’ve found it’s still hard to make a living providing care without ripping people off. I work with people just coming out of hospital so I see a lot of care companies in action and they do vary - some of them obviously do work harder in recruitment and training than others.

I think insisting on using the commode so that your poor dad is sleeping in the stench is simply unacceptable.

Thank you. I hope the SS care needs assessment will come through soon.

In the meantime I have a telephone appointment with an Admiral dementia nurse in half an hour to see if they can offer any more advice.

I have indeed posted a few times. I just try to reach out to whoever I can tbh, dementia care is a lonely world, absolutely none of my friends are going through this, they are either lucky to still have elderly parents alive and in good health or others have been, dare I say it 'lucky' that their parent went quickly without too much suffering or needing care.

I have had enough really, there always seems to be something to sort out for my parents. I've been on the phone all morning trying to find a local pharmacy who stocks mum's dementia meds because Boots have missed it off her delivery and can't tell me when it will be available.

Always something to do.......

With my neighbour it was 20 minutes = 20 min in the house and 10 min on the road.

When I cared for people if it was a 30 minute slot id do what ever was required of me and then whatever time was left id spend it chatting to the person. Or asking if they wanted nails painted/ anything really. It’s a piss take and they should be there the full time

None, so stupid of us, I know. I have said to my dad to keep quiet until we have had the SS assessment and then I plan to get a few care companies over to see what they can offer and we will make our final decision then so I will let it run for the time being.

As I have explained in my replies, it is £26 per hour per carer and they always come in twos.

That's lovely. It does appear that carers who go above and beyond are quite a rare things these days.

They come in pairs and charge £26 per hour and £20 per half hour

So you are paying £40 for their so called 30mins slots 3x a day, so £120 per day?
Yet instead of providing 90mins of care they are only doing 45-80-mins a day?

They work around 45 mins in the morning and round it up to the hour and afternoon and evening visits are generally around 20 mins and they round it up to 30 mins.

So on average it's £52 for the morning visit, £40 for the afternoon and £40 for the evening.

If they don't have a "minimum charge is for 30 mins" clause in their T&Cs (which they might well do), have you tried sending the invoice back with pro rata payment for the actual amount of time they spent inside the house as shown on a ring doorbell? (Of course, next week they just take a personal call or check their email on their phone indoors before leaving unless there are cameras inside too).

This is the issue we have, we have no contract so no T&C's. Everything we agreed to initially was all verbal.

They email their separate invoices weekly and I pay them by bank transfer.

If they assess your mum as having care needs, have a care agency. Then your dad will get used to those workers and you can switch over to the agency doing both.
Instal cameras and let the workers know you’ve done this. Wonderful how that concentrates the mind.

I would phone the HMRC at the very least and find out that they're declaring this income, because if they're not offering any T & C's or paperwork, it's very unlikely.

This is the better scenario imo. They can bill us monthly and it will only be one payment, at the moment I have to frequently check my dad's emails for the invoices then do bank transfers for all 6 carers, I had asked them to put all invoices in on a Thursday when I'm there all day but they just put them in randomly any day they chose.

I also want to go with an agency so if there are any gripes I can pick up the phone and call the person in charges, are carers are all self employed so no one is in charge as such

I don't know how they can charge and behave like that, to be honest. If I had someone where it was just a medication visit, I'd sit and chat to them for the full half hour and ask if they needed me to wash up or do any small jobs. For some elderly people it's the only contact they'll have that day.

@ImissSpangles I'm sure you've done this, but make sure your parents are receiving the correct levels of Attendance Allowance (not means tested) and Pension Credit (if eligible).