The care homes that just don’t care

A Which? report this week suggested that half the major care home providers are failing residents in a quarter of their homes.

But what particularly struck me was that small care homes are more likely to achieve a good rating than larger ones.

i’ve often thought the term ‘care home’ is utterly inappropriate. For too many residents, these places fail to provide care and are certainly not a home in any sense that you or i would recognise.

Many of them are little more than holding pens where people are sent to wait to die.

There should be no place for the profit principle in providing care to the elderly and the vulnerable — yet, increasingly, care homes are seen only as a source of income.

More and more homes are being bought up by private equity firms who care not a jot about the welfare of the residents: they are only interested in their balance sheet. For them, the residents are just a figure on their bottom line.

Over the past few years, two care homes have closed for every new one that’s opened. At first, this sounds odd. Surely, with our ageing population, we need more care homes, not fewer?

in fact, what’s really happening is that smaller care homes are closing and being replaced with large, ‘factory-style’ care homes, with some housing 60 or more residents. (in the medical profession they are often referred to as ‘granny farms’.)

This is because, just as with factory farming, they’re deemed ‘more efficient’ and cheaper. But as the Which? analysis shows, the care is grossly inferior.

We know that living in large, characterless institutions is dehumanising, and there are increased rates of neglect and abuse. This is part of the reason that the old Victorian asylums were closed in the Nineties.

You simply cannot provide care on an industrial scale. it makes my blood boil.