Home alone

Imagine that every morning when you wake up, you are unable to get out of bed without the help of a carer. You might wake up quite early, needing the toilet or wanting a hot drink, but you live alone and rely on people who are paid to come and look after you.

You may wait many hours for help to arrive. It may never come if the home care agency don’t have enough carers on duty, or it may be much later than you expect because your carer has been delayed helping other people. In that time you may soil yourself, become dehydrated, or attempt to move around and end up falling, potentially breaking a bone and ending up in hospital, the shock of which, in someone who is elderly, could bring about premature death.

This is the reality that many single, vulnerable, elderly people with physical or mental health problems face every day. When care does arrive it can often be rushed, with the carer unable to give all of the help that is required. Imagine if you had to choose between being washed and dressed, helped to the toilet, fed or given your medication? You need assistance with all of those tasks, but your carer only has time to help with some of them, leaving you hungry or dirty as a result.

For many people who live alone, the carer that comes in to help them may be the only person that they see or speak to all day, and yet there is no opportunity for meaningful interaction. This is a system that is almost de-humanised, where the people who need care are effectively on a conveyor belt, and carers are operatives in a factory environment where output, rather than quality, is king.

Over the course of just a few weeks of home care you may see many different faces, each time having to try and explain (if you are able to) what you need and want. The turnover of staff is high because this is low-paid, often poorly trained work, where staff are put under immense pressure to meet deadlines, rush care, make stark and extremely unpleasant choices about what they realistically have time to do for someone, and where every shift leaves them feeling physically and mentally exhausted. Many carers often end up completing tasks in their own time, such are the time constraints enforced by their employers.

Morale is low, carers feel undervalued, and those who chose this type of work precisely because they genuinely wanted to care for vulnerable people feel utterly let down by a system that is run around two defining factors – the time on the clock and the money being paid to the home care provider.

Don’t run away with the idea that having home care is a cheap option for the most vulnerable, elderly citizens in our communities, because it isn’t. Universally however, most people would rather remain in their own home than move into alternative more supported accommodation or indeed into a care home. I would argue that everyone has the right to do that, whenever practically possible, and therefore in a compassionate society this should be supported, not just financially for those who need assistance paying for it, but from a cultural point of view as well.

The culture that defines how we care for older people in the UK is still one where we don’t value the person enough. As a society we don’t make provision for elderly people to exercise choice and be supported to do that, we cut corners because we think it doesn’t matter, we try to rush those who are naturally slower than they once were, we are incapable of seeing beyond ‘doing the basics’ and we ignore the need every human being has to feel cherished, loved, cared for, appreciated and listened to.

It can be very easy to blame the carers on the front line who have the day-to-day contact with our vulnerable elderly people, and there are certainly those within this line of work who should never be caring for anyone, least of all those in greatest need. But I believe that so much of what is wrong within the care system, and home care in particular, is about what happens within the companies that provide care and the authorities who commission it.

Many home care providers will say that they don’t get paid enough by councils (whose budgets have been squeezed in this area) to provide the care that people need. Councils will say that for the money they are paying, they expect far better for the people they are responsible for supporting. The real truth probably lies somewhere between these two viewpoints, but what I always find staggering in these debates is how the needs and the voices of the people who are on the receiving end of this care are generally never heard, and even more worryingly, those who are making the decisions often have no real appreciation of the situation that these people are in.

Of course we know of the cases, all too common, where home care has gone so catastrophically wrong that someone has died as a result of neglect. Yet all over the country, every day, neglect is happening, often not with immediately tragic consequences but with the slow-burn, saddening effect of reducing the lives of people who were once vibrant, hard-working, energetic and valued, into something that is a daily struggle to exist, a struggle that for many may not feel like one that they want to keep fighting for.

I couldn’t be a home care worker, simply because I could not cope with leaving people who needed me, at the same time knowing that if I stayed longer I let someone else down. It is an impossible situation. Home care is a vital resource that a compassionate society should value. Carers should be well trained, well paid and with enough colleagues to give our cherished elderly the help that they need in a time frame that they can cope with.

This is a job where you care for people with very high dependency and often multiple problems – it should be a profession with a far greater standing than it currently has. Ultimately care should be about helping people to flourish, live their lives well and feel happy and fulfilled. It should never be about losing dignity, being lonely, frightened, misunderstood, neglected and potentially an early death. If you offered anyone the ‘services’ in that last sentence, they would never sign up for them.

Until next time...

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