Widow’s family hounded over £15k care fees ... for help she never received
‘Little evidence it was needed’
A CARE home tried to charge the family of a vulnerable elderly widow £700 a week for care that was neither needed nor given, a watchdog report said yesterday.
Managers more than doubled her fees then threatened her son with legal action unless he paid almost £15,000.
The bill shot up from £500 a week to £1,200 after the home discovered the council would not be paying her fees and she had enough money to pay.
The woman’s son was told the 140 per cent increase was necessary to give his 72- year- old mother ‘ one to one care’, it was claimed. But the extra care provided was not needed and the Haresbrook Park home in Worcestershire produced little evidence to back the claim that it was, the report by the Local Government and Social Care Ombudsman said.
The findings come as the Competition and Markets Authority said the techniques used by care homes to make up the bills for self-funding residents may be illegal and new laws may be needed to stop rip-offs. Yesterday’s report from the Ombudsman condemned the behaviour of the home’s managers and ordered them to pay back around £15,000 in fees they should never have charged.
It also found a string of faults against Worcestershire County Council and its social workers, who failed to assess the needs of the woman, Mrs C, or take proper responsibility for her care.
In fact the council should have been paying her care home bills throughout the time she was there.
The council should consider whether to stop sending vulnerable people to the home in future, the report added.
Mrs C went into Haresbrook Park near Tenbury Wells, run by the Capital Care Group, in January 2015. She was thought to be suffering from dementia and had no capacity to take decisions for herself.
Social workers made no proper assessment of the care she needed. However, they decided she had sufficient assets to pay her own fees and she was made to pay £500 a week from February.
But the council was breaking the law, the Ombudsman said. Because she had not nominated anyone to take over her financial affairs, and her family could not do so without a court order, the council should have gone on paying her fees.
In April Haresbrook managers told Mrs C’s son the fees would go up by £700 a week and they backdated the increase to the start of March. Mrs C died in August 2015.
A spokesman for the Ombudsman said the home could provide little evidence the extra care was either needed or delivered.
Capital Care Group owner Mrs Manjeet Rai apologised to Mrs C’s son yesterday and said that Haresbrook Park now ‘clearly documents one to one care to provide evidence to the funder that this is still required and is being delivered as described’.
Watchdog the Care Quality Commission has threatened to prosecute Bupa if it fails to raise standards after an undercover investigation by Channel 4’s Dispatches programme, being shown tonight at 8pm, highlighted alleged ‘institutional abuse and neglect’ at some of the firm’s care homes.
Bupa said it did not accept a number of the accusations but was taking the matter ‘very seriously’ and working with the CQC.