Live in care at Home – Elderly home care blog

I have been watching the series currently running on BBC TV about how the increasing problem of senile dementia is predominantly addressed in the UK

The series is described thus:

“Businessman Sir Gerry Robinson tries to improve three struggling care homes. Can Gerry change a culture of stagnant lounges, poor quality of life and a lack of specialist staff?”

That description alone sums up the deficiencies of the entire present regime.

The major flaw in the system is that most dementia sufferers end up in care homes in the first place (although actually nursing homes too in many cases), where in most instances, the logistics of providing a decent standard of care are fatally compromised by the sheer cost of doing so.

In other words, the overheads in such institutions are already so onerous that it can become a critical extra expense to significantly improve on the care delivered, the increasing cost of complying with ill-conceived and ever burgeoning Health and Safety regulations in particular (to which Sir Gerry refers) being a major element of those overheads.

Let us dwell for a moment on what the present standard of care actually is.

I quote from Sir Gerry’s commentary on the first program in the series:

“The average time a dementia resident is actually engaged in any form of contact with anyone is two minutes in every six hours”.

So for a total direct engagement time with their carers and other staff of just 56 minutes in every week, the average dementia sufferer in the average care home is being charged up to £750. As only a few pounds out of that figure is spent on the carers’ wages per se, then the rest is overhead, which as that is already now becoming unmanageable for many care homes (and is the reason why many are already now failing of course), means that any extra cost in improving the standard of care (such as the dementia mapping that Sir Gerry talks about) will simply send yet more of them over the edge into bankruptcy.

And that in a nutshell is why the average standard of care in UK care homes is so poor – the overheads are simply too prohibitive to enable all but a relative handful of them to provide decent care.

There is ultimately only one practicable solution to this problem and that is to abandon the whole concept of trying to care for dementia sufferers in care homes at all, and simply look after them in their own homes instead.

There they can receive more like sixty HOURS of direct contact with their carers per week as opposed to 60 minutes, and in that setting there is obviously no limit on the time their carers have available to give them all the help and support they need.

I would be interested to see other contributors’ views on the same issue.