Vitara wrote:Discussion on the CQC (Care Quality Commission) role and effectiveness is interesting, .................
You may get lucky and find an Agency that can provide the same Carers on a regular rotating basis, but in my experience the people who do Live In often move around. I don't think this need be a great problem, but some input from family may be needed for new Carers & something like a handover folder with key information will help.
The other thing to consider is that it sometimes takes 5-6 weeks for newly arranged carers, visiting or live in, to settle into a pattern. If things aren't right then do let the Agency know, they will want to resolve any problems, but it will help if you also allow a bedding in period and are able to work with the Agency and Carers rather than being confrontational..............
Psamathe wrote:............. I'm the one providing 24/7 live-in care at present and my plan is that when the live-in carer arrives I will move to the sitting room sofa bed for a few days overlap so I can show where things are, what I am currently doing to help (more what those being care for like and don't like), etc.
I suspect there will be difficult times ahead .................Ian
^^^^^^^There is good sense here.
In my experience, people working "at the coalface" providing care are by and large decent human beings who would like to do a good job with the least amount of fuss possible. ....and working unsociable hours for minimum pay. Treat them decently and give them a chance to do a good job, and they will. The people I cared for were largely abandoned by their families, and the most common family "interaction" I got was criticism......always via a third party, always concerning events they hadn't actually witnessed. This didn't sit well with me, to be criticised by somebody who couldn't be bothered with their own family member.
Its my experience of life in general, that whenever there is seen to be a "problem" of some sort, then the usual "solution" is to impose yet another layer of supervision. In industry, you get whole departments doing "quality control" or "quality assurance".....great names for box-ticking. In care work, you get spurious layers of training and re-training, and of super-supervisors supervising the supervisors......but only on weekdays between nine and five o'clock.
My experience of care work is limited to small homes for people with learning difficulties, where the individual homes are part of a much larger organisation. You get the organisation being run (at a "county" level) by a cartelle of people who all know each other as they have all been in the organisation for a number of years, and they all support each other, sometimes to the detriment of both the service users and the other staff.
Heres my tally....
Home 1 .....whenever the manager was on shift, he made sure he was "supernumary"....in other words he was an extra body on shift.....except he wasn't actually ON shift, he was travelling round the other houses with a clipboard having "meetings".
Home 2.....the manager had child-care difficulties, so she was allowed the priveledge of doing her "administrative" work hours at home......except she didn't,,,,,when she was ON shift, and meant to be with the service users, she was actually in the office doing admin., so we were a staff member down.
Home 3......One senior staff member in prison for stealing service users money, two staff member suicides.
My two fat ladies were in a rage because they thought they were being denied access to the house. (what did they think was going on?....putting away the thumb-screws? burning records and files?)
Actually, a light bulb had blown and the trip (fuse) had tripped.....this turned off some of the lights and also the doorbell. The twenty year old lass who had worked the previous days late shift, done the sleep-over and was now responsible for getting five people ready for their days activities didn't understand this, or know to go down into the cellar to re-set the trip. Hitler and Mussolini had reduced this poor lass to tears.....I sent her home, and told them they could deal with me.
Yes, they said they could shut the house down.....how would this help, exactly?
