Care - what do you think?

[LanaorAna2]

Can't take my eyes off the horror and how good Alison Steadman is. So authentic.

The other point is that most families do not want their loved ones going into care. We didn't. My dad was in his 90s and my mum also in her 90s was caring for him single handed. It was only when he became so unstable on his feet and would need hoists etc to get out of bed that we even began to consider it.

The best way forward for a lot of families is adequate care at home.

'Shame on Jimmy Mc Govern'

I disagree Mrsmuddlepies.
At least he got it on the telly and a discussion has ensued which might lead to changes for the good, hopefully.

I'm not the founder of Care to be Different - honest guv!

But I hugely appreciated all they offered me - it is free advice online. You can, as I did, download their book for £20 (at the time|) and believe me it was money well spent.

I just spent 30 years as a SW watching these injustices unfold - and they relied on keeping the public in ignorance. I am very much in favour of people knowing their rights.

Okay I believe you! It's just that I know her quite well, so was wondering....!

Jimmy McGovern got the care problem on telly. Deserves an Oscar for that alone. As we know, the issue isn't exactly Sunday night sexy or soothing.

And it's about old people, so 0 BBC funding for that. Worse, about old English people who also have the audacity to be female, so I can imagine they only got BBC funding because the commissioners were in the Seychelles that day.

OK, the play didn't go far enough to show how broken the people and how broken the system really are. But I'm struggling to see how you could broadcast the true awfulness of what many carers face daily without an 18 cert.

My mother is currently in an excellent nursing home after a devastating stroke a few weeks ago. It was a whole new world - new words, new places, new mother :(
She's now bedridden, not eating, has no real idea where she is, what happened or who we are and the pain is immeasurable. We are basically waiting for her to die I cant believe how lucky we were to get instant Fast Track continuing acre. But I'd rather she was still my mum. The programme was simply excellent

And yes, it is entirely down to me to do everything as my witch elder sister went NC for pathetic and selfish reasons 7 years ago. She has popped in twice for 20 minutes though....

Oh and under the new guidance Mary wouldn't have had a CHC assessment in hospital anyway.

My mum did!

Having watched this last night and then listened to The Untold this morning on Radio 4 (with a family trying to get care for their dad in his 90s with dementia) I just feel we are failing our elders. I thought last night's programme managed to raise some important issues (not least the low pay and massive responsibility of care home workers and the lack of profit in the sector) but agree parts were unrealistic (the fees for the private care home would be double here). I also worry that with retirement age for women being increased there will be fewer family carers available to look after elderly parents so even more pressure on the state to fund paid-for care. It's terrifying.

You are right about the problem of raising the retirement age leaving a huge carer gap. I am carer to OH who has PD - if I had been at work he would be costing the state a very great deal of money.

Could the posters who keep trying to heap shame and censure on siblings who don't help as much as expected - there are families you know where the sibling who refuses to help has had a lifetime of second class treatment from their parents. Should they really have to step up to the plate and care for someone who never cared properly for them?

The system cant have it all. They want ppl to continue working but yet they want them to care as well.

Read any article about a disabled person and their carer that appears in a local rag. Look at the comments underneath a lot of whom call them scroungers. Double the vitriol if they are social housing tenants.

Family carers get taken for granted and spoken down to and seen as lesser. Is it surprising that more of them are starting to say NO!

These 3am discharges Why are they occuring? Is it because it makes it harder for the potential carer to say no. What if the potential carer has other commitments.

And its nearly always a woman.

Watching on catch up - pass the tissues! It's far too close to home.

inews.co.uk/culture/television/care-bbc1-dementia-drama-sheridan-smith-realistic/

My dad’s dementia turned my family’s life upside down. BBC1 drama Care was so realistic it gave me chills Watching Care, and the family's struggle to win funding for continuing healthcare, felt all too familiar

In BBC1’s Care, Sheridan Smith plays Jenny, a woman fighting for the help and funding she needs to care for her mother Mary, who developed dementia after suffering a catastrophic stroke. It is help Mary needs to be able to live with dignity. For me, this 90-minute drama was more of a reality. My dad developed vascular dementia at the age of 65 after suffering a series of mini strokes and just as Jenny’s life was turned upside down, mine was too.

The reality of dementia and the impact that it has on the family is portrayed so realistically in Care, it gave me chills. Through the 90 minutes, Mary lashes out at Smith’s character, hits her, refuses to take medication, cries, gets out of a car and wanders off and screams that she wants to go home whenever she’s in hospital. My dad did all of these things. The distress on Jenny’s face when she is faced with watching her mum’s every move is exactly how I felt whenever my dad moved an inch. But what got me the most was the blank stare Mary gives. You might not notice it amid the dialogue around her, but I know that look very well – and the pain and feeling of helplessness that comes with it.

The drama delves into Jenny’s past with her estranged husband and her strained relationship with her sister Clare, but the crux of the programme highlights the lack of knowledge about continuing healthcare and how important it is for those caring for someone with dementia. I am very glad that the BBC has shone a light on this important topic that needs to become a main focus when discussions about adult care arise

It’s only after Jenny is asked about the specialist funding by a manager of another and much more expensive care home that she finds out what it is and what it means for her family. In the meantime, months and weeks have passed since Mary’s stroke, countless insensitive hospital discharge meetings and a short stint in an underperforming and understaffed care home that resulted in Mary being able to walk out without anyone noticing. Those months and weeks you can’t get back. I’ve lost count of the amount of times my family and I worried about how we would cope with dad when he came home, after we ruled out putting him in a care home

We were given a number of options from the discharge team about what our next step was. Not one of them included the chance to fill out a continuing healthcare form. Instead, it was assumed that we would be privately funding my dad’s care because the number of hours the social services could offer wasn’t sufficient. It was only raised when my sister, who works in the NHS and knew about continuing healthcare through her job, asked whether we were eligible

We were granted the checklist and, later on, the all important funding. With the help of carers during the day and overnight my family was able to enjoy the time we had left with my dad without bearing the financial burden. But I wonder what would have happened if my sister didn’t know? Would the discharge team eventually have told us? Or would we have had to pay thousands of pounds each week to ensure that my dad was safe and comfortable in his own home while fretting about how we were going to maintain the cost? I dread to think. Gillian Juckes, who worked alongside Jimmy McGovern to create the drama, shared her personal reasons for highlighting such an important issue. “I wanted to concentrate on women because women make up 70% of the dementia carers, the informal dementia carers in this country. 20% of those go from full time work to part time work in order to do it. It can’t go on.”

In one scene, Jenny and Clare attend an appeal hearing after their initial request for continuing healthcare is rejected on the grounds that Mary doesn’t meet the requirements (despite evidence proving otherwise). It really resonated with me as, sitting in front of a panel, Jenny reminds them that her mum has only been in hospital twice – once to give birth to her and once to give birth to her sister. She hasn’t cost them a lot of money but has paid towards the NHS her whole life, so why shouldn’t she get something back? Exactly

Read more at: inews.co.uk/culture/television/care-bbc1-dementia-drama-sheridan-smith-realistic/

www.mumsnet.com/Talk/in_the_news/1484476-Closer-magazines-benefit-bashing-story-features-a-carer

Alison Steadman is a breathtaking actor. She gets across the pain and misery of her dementia all too well - no script, no movement, nada to help.

My mum did!

That's because she is fast track which doesn't involve the usual assessment.

Not to say that people aren't also screwed out of fast track CHC, they are. I have worked with doctors who didn't know what it was.

I am really sorry to hear about your mum.

Ah! I had no idea what was going on. I know they explained it but I was in such a state! I too nothing in. Thank you.

it was shockingly inaccurate. i work in neurological rehab and the way that discharge meeting was portrayed would never happen. it painted a really poor picture of the nhs staff especially on the stroke unit. the ending was ridiculous. Typical BBC, too afraid to blame the real cuplrits, the government not nhs staff.

It is ignorance that stops people getting these payments. And it is an ignorance that is perpetuated by the system; simply because the system cannot financially sustain the payment to everyone who qualifies.

What SHOULD happen is that every patient (and/or their relatives if there are cognitive impairments) should have ALL the options outlined as regards payment for care. This does not happen for the reason outlined above. It is a system that works by subterfuge. It is fundamentally wrong.

If the government does not wish to have to pay these fees, then they have to change the law. What we have at the moment is a law that is avoided because it is unsustainable.

im wary about watching this i.e is it gonna be another lets bash carers without taking into perspective wider context programme? will it make me rage??

im wary about watching this i.e is it gonna be another lets bash carers without taking into perspective wider context programme? will it make me rage??

I don't think it does. I think the other sister (the one who wasn't the main carer) was portrayed really well as somebody that couldn't handle the hands on care but was advocating as hard as she could because she felt guilty about the role the main carer was taking on. I don't think it was unsympathetic or unrealistic but people seem to think she was a bitch so... meh. The sister who was the main carer was portrayed in an entirely positive light which was troubling but not unsympathetic.

If the government does not wish to have to pay these fees, then they have to change the law. What we have at the moment is a law that is avoided because it is unsustainable

The problem is CHC isn't the law as much as a plaster covering a gap in the law.

The history is really interesting. It stems back to the closure of NHS residential hospitals following the push to end institutionalisation. The hospitals closed and the LA was told to come and assess the people to support them in the community (community in this context can mean a care home). As social care is means tested suddenly people who never had to pay for care were now asked to fork out even though their needs hadn't changed. There was a court case which the claimant won and everything was fucked because, of course, the line between health and social care is not clear cut.

CHC and the DST was introduced to try and provide a standardised way of determining if somebody had a health or social care need. Obviously it didn't work. The truth is the line is entirely subjective.

The whole thing is riddled with contradictions and double standards.

And don't get me started on Section 117 of the Mental Health Act which means you can have two people with identical needs and savings/assets/income and one never have to contribute and the other self fund their care.

I understood that the problem goes even further back and that the promise of care for anyone with a medical need (regardless of income) is enshrined in the original act that set up the NHS. That has never been removed and this is what puts local health authorities in such a terrible bind. Clearly that promise cannot be honoured as there are insufficient funds.

I think that the criteria for continuing care funding are broadly fair and that if staff administering this did so in a proper way, then the right people would get the help they need. The distinction between social and medical need is pretty spurious really and was bolted on for political reasons, as health and social care were squabbling over who should pay for what. This is clearly nonsense as the one follows from another.

In my area Health and SSD combined their budgets to try and make sense of this - but it did not last of course.

What I object to is that people (both patients and relatives) are simply not told that it is possible that the NHS might fund their care under the continuing care payments, so they have no chance to press their case for it. A secret assessment is done and - guess what? - in the main most do not qualify.

I understood that the problem goes even further back and that the promise of care for anyone with a medical need (regardless of income) is enshrined in the original act that set up the NHS

Indeed, not just that but it is actually against the law for the local authority to fund health care.