Care Today

Been thinking about care again, surprise, surprise.

While I understand the position councils are taking on care with regards to the budget cuts they all face, I don't understand why the have no focus what so ever on the lives of the carers that are providing the actual care to the end client. At the end of the day when it comes down to tendering for council preference, I don't understand why there is no attention payed to this. Looking at insurance, financial standing, health and safety, equality and diversity and technical ability is not enough. While it would be ridiculous of me to state that carers should earn at least £8 an hour and such, it's not ridiculous of me to say that councils should be ensuring that when companies up charges inline with inflation then carers wages should be upped inline with inflation also, there should be a serious approach in the tender process to looking at the lives of the carers that work for the company in the way calls are put upon them, working hours and patterns, benefits and morale. Then maybe we could see a reduction in staff cycling and an improvement in continuity which is the thing that Government, Local Authorities, Care Service Providers, Service Users and good carers themselves all crave!

Cycling

Cycling of staff in and out of care services put those that have the right mindset when providing care under greater and greater pressure, when we see standards dropping it takes our morale with it, let's face it, the increasing need for care has created a culture in which people come into our industry simply to earn money to go out at the weekend, or to get away from the dole making them answer to them on a weekly basis. Unless you have empathy for the people you care for, you should not be caring for them!

This Is A Career

Anyone coming into this industry should be made blatantly aware that this business is a career not a job and that their mere presence makes a massive difference to the people that they visit, whether they say or do good or bad things makes a difference to that individual.

About My Opinion

Just for reference there is no arrow pointing to a company in this text, I have been doing research into morale, standards and working patterns from one end of the country to the other in a bid to better understand the industry and how I should approach my own position, and what I am reading from carer forums, service user forums (and family's of) tells me that cycling is a huge problem our industry faces and I cannot tell you just how many comments I have read from carers having left one company for another through their lack of morale only to find exactly the same problems under the surface of their new employer.

My Answer

In my eyes, to provide real tangible continuity their needs to be a massive focus on the lives of carers, from what they are payed, to the working patterns they have, to the benefits they don't have, the list goes on.

But at the same time there needs to be a stiffer approach to discipline and structure and ground floor staff management and the sheer lack of communication that exists in an industry that is based upon it.

In my view just from the structure side of it, we should have teams of a set size, use your hands, put the thumb of one hand to the side of the other hand and imagine the hand with the thumb touching the other hand is a hand full of thumbs, each touching another hand, right there you have five lines of communication attaching to another five lines of communication, each of solid structure. I am not saying that teams should only have five people in, with communication presently so poor the teams should probably have no less than ten in and no more than 20 in, but no more, and what is of pivotal importance is that the team leader needs to actively seek conversation with their team. If the structure is maintained by the right people, then compliance and standards will follow and those carers that need prompting and settling can be dealt with and team morale can be maintained and encouraged.

Serious effort should be made by Service Providers to adopt a model like this, I have been to enough meetings to realize that with morale at an all time low across this industry, they only turn into mosh pits and people leave with the 'same old, same old' attitude.

Of course to introduce and maintain a structure like this will take tooling and resources, and care team leaders will need to be given time, patience and of course financial recognition, but at the end of the day we would have a solid maintainable structure that we can work with no matter what company we work for.

Please note that at no point have I mentioned training, this is because now more than ever, training is not the issue here, training standards are higher than ever.
I say again the issues are communication and structure, confidence and morale, and standards and compliance.