How can we have any faith in care home standards?
ANYONE who has had to make the heartbreaking decision that elderly relatives are no longer capable of taking care of themselves and need the safety of a care home will know what agonising choices have to be faced. How will mum or dad cope with being plucked from familiar surroundings which hold precious memories built up over so many years?
How will we choose a home which provides a high standard of comfort and care but which doesn’t cost so much that every penny of our loved one’s life savings are wiped out in no time? How can we be sure that staff, the vast majority of whom are dedicated and caring, speak good enough English for elderly people to make their needs known?
And possibly most importantly, how can we be certain carers are properly trained and fully qualified and that standards are rigorously checked and maintained? God forbid but if something goes wrong because the home has failed, who will make sure action is taken to protect other people?
Questions such as these make a tough decision so very much harder at a time when emotions are drained by the demands of those you love who, through no fault of their own, can suddenly place a heavy strain on family resources.
The fact that there is an independent commission whose job it is to inspect the providers of the country’s care services should give reassurance – but now a shocking investigation into a series of deaths in homes has revealed alarming failures and a lack of transparency. If we can’t trust the watchdog, who can we trust?
SHOCKINGLY the lives of vulnerable residents in care homes have been put at risk because the Care Quality Commission ( CQC) admits it failed to act swiftly on a host of official warnings from coroners about negligent standards. It has belatedly made changes but chief executive David Behan says: “I am not going to defend the indefensible. We are not pretending we have got this cracked. We have got more to do.”
Hardly words that fill you with confidence, are they? I’ve lost count of the number of
Chris Roycroft- Davis times a child has died because of failures by social services and some highly paid penpusher has popped his head over the parapet to say: “Lessons have been learned. This must never happen again.” Now it seems the CQC wants us to put our faith in it despite the fact it has failed the elderly.
Last year 13,816 unexpected deaths in care homes in England were reported to the CQC and coroners have a legal duty to write reports on action needed to prevent further deaths if during an inquest they identify risks to other residents of a home. You would expect the CQC to handle these vital reports as a matter of extreme urgency, demanding that homes make changes and then carrying out inspections to make sure they have been done.
However, that would require a level of competence which is not apparent from the CQC’s dismal record. The Bureau of Investigative Journalism studied a sample of 23 cases of deaths in care homes and found that in more than half of them the CQC failed to act on a coroner’s warning. Individual case histories make horrific reading so we will consider just one, which is tragically typical.
Barbara Cooke, 84, suffered body sores, a skin infection and incontinence in a care home. Her son Simon says: “She was shouting with pain before she was sent to hospital – she told me she wanted to die.” Sadly Barbara did die in hospital but neither the hospital nor the care home referred her death to the coroner. It was only when her son registered the death and complained about his mother’s poor treatment that the coroner was alerted.
At the inquest she recorded a verdict of death by natural causes “contributed to by neglect” and in her report to the CQC she highlighted the home’s failure to treat Barbara’s sores, said the home was inadequately staffed and warned other lives were at risk. It took six months before the CQC inspected the home – a whole year after Barbara’s death – and found that it was unclean and unsafe. So for 12 months the lives of elderly, vulnerable people were put at risk because the CQC couldn’t do its job properly. The chief executive earns £ 185,000 a year of taxpayers’ money, by the way, and 20 of the staff earn more than £ 100,000. Nice work if you can get it.
DO THEY deserve their massive salaries? Eileen Chubb, founder of campaigning charity Compassion in Care, says: “In our experience the CQC loses vital information in its systems all the time. We get a huge amount of information coming in that needs acting on immediately and we are a small organisation with a tiny budget. The CQC does not seem to be capable of dealing with all the intelligence it receives.”
Judy Downey, of the Relatives and Residents Association, which supports care home residents and their families, says the lack of rigorous follow- up by the CQC after an incident or unexpected death “continues to be a huge cause for concern.”
One more thing worries me: if you want to check if a care home has been properly inspected after a coroner has sounded the alarm, where can you do so? Only on the CQC website, I’m afraid. It is its own judge and jury. Would you trust it to protect the interests of someone you love? I know I wouldn’t.
‘ Watchdog is guilty of
alarming failures’