News

Monday
A long-standing and steadily deteriorating client accuses our care worker of stealing. A previous accusation against a different member of staff is still fresh in our minds, but the procedure has to be followed and a supervisor who can be ill-spared is despatched to make enquiries (discreetly) with the care worker's other clients. Social services agree that all visits to that client must be double-handers for our staff's protection (good); this means finding another available care worker (tricky); the accused is very upset and doesn't want to go back in, so two care workers need to be found (nightmare).

Tuesday
Quick flick through the draft domiciliary standards - we'll need to review some of our processes and do a bit of tightening up but on the whole, nothing earth-shaking. Some colleagues in the private sector are almost hysterical with outrage at the requirements. I wonder what standards they have been working to up until now?

Wednesday
Try to work out the best way of expanding NVQs in a largely disinterested workforce. Most of our staff work less than 15 hours a week and this has been consistently so every year for the past 15 years. It's a fact of life in the home care sector that most employees are very part-time by choice and are not hungry for careers, professional development and all the other current buzzwords. Some are, of course, and they tend to be the ones working full-time - unfortunately they make up less than 50 per cent of our workforce.

Thursday
Go to a meeting in the evening which tells me how our local authority plans to cope with bed-blocking and winter pressures. The key to the plan appears to be (surprise, surprise) a rapidly responding, domiciliary sector with spare capacity. Odd that we are so often seen as the solution to other sectors' problems, yet we are rarely first in anyone's list of priorities when it comes to resourcing. It would be nice if someone, somewhere, just once acknowledged that domiciliary care provides services to far more people than any other sector. Residential provision is very small beer by comparison, whilst the primary and secondary health sectors that the government is pouring money into for no visible reward have a status and pre-eminence out of all proportion to the numbers they actually benefit. Realistic investment in preventative home care, delivered imaginatively and generously would improve the quality of citizens' lives far more than the same amount spent in any other branch of health or social care.

Friday
My day off but I don't want to miss an inter-agency meeting trying to solve the problems of recruitment and retention in the care sector. Cheeringly, no-one wonders, even once, why they are in their job and whether it has a point and a value.