Recently in Carers Category

We love a salacious story here at Community Care, so I'm a little disappointed this one slipped below the radar last week.

Kirsty Green, a care worker in Bristol, was jailed for nine months having stolen £46,000 from an elderly woman to buy sex toys so she could start another career as an Anne Summers party hostess.

Now, as much as we love to bring you a bit of smut on a Tuesday morning, I am rather irked at the reporting of this story.

Both the Daily Mail and the Mirror describe Green as a carer. This is not true, she was a care worker and those two things are very different. One is a job another is something you do, sacrificing your time, with little reward for your own reasons.

It's endemic of the confusion about the role of carers in society, and their low status, that they are confused with professional careers like this so readily. They don't even have their own status in the public mindset. I would not hold up Green as a model of professionalism given this conviction though.

Image by Chryosaora on Flickr

The shadow secretary of state for communities and local government, Caroline Spelman, has ignited the debate over the quality of care delivered to those with muscular dystrophy. She criticised the government saying many in her constituency had trouble getting access to various therapies from the "overstretched, unco-ordinated" services.

Spelman said that there was little access to care planning for this client group and this was causing many unnecessary emergency admissions which formed a significant proportion of PCT spending on emergency admissions.

by Mark Ivory

As the seemingly endless wait for the adult social care green paper goes on, it's a good time to glance at the NHS's preparations for it.  Or rather the lack of them. 

by Adam McCulloch

Here's a very perplexing case history for those of you in older people's services. I'd really like some comments, especially if you have ideas how things could have been handled differently or have any suggestions to make. You might even have had a similar experience. I really want to know how typical this is.
One thing I want to make clear is that the client involved here is definitely at the more 'awkward' end of the spectrum. She scores very highly in mental health tests and has convinced several occupational therapists and, apparently, psychiatrists of her ability to cope at home. She is lucid and persuasive:

 

By Derren Hayes

The thorny issue of whether religion has a place in the caring professions reared its head again this week when a community nurse was suspended for offering to pray for one of her frail patients http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2009/feb/02/nurse-prayer-suspended.

 By Derren Hayes

Shock horror, Barack Obama is a smoker. "A smoker" I hear you cry. That's right. Surely, this must call into question whether he is fit to take office?

by Lauren Revans

If ever we needed proof that the government’s left hand doesn’t know what the right hand is doing, we were handed it on a plate this week by business secretary John Hutton.

The MP – who until June 2007 was work and pensions secretary – has revealed that, despite an earlier promise to extend the right to request flexible working hours to parents of older children, a review into the issue is in fact unlikely to result in anything other than a small increase in the age limit (from the current age of five).

This weeks Community Care magazine was a dedicated Carers special issue and as such all three feature article cover carers.

First up we have Lauren Revans feature "Steps in the right direction", which looks how charities are lobbying to influence the forthcoming carers strategy.