I believe the 'falling out' led to them making reporting my siblings and I to the council's Adult Social Services about concerns with my dad's welfare. This is a bit of long story but I'll try keep it short.
The report wasn't from the (private) carers themselves, it was their management, most likely the director who has never met my dad or been to his house. We felt some time ago she wasn't as friendly as originally thought but, as we had little contact with her, and the care manager and carers we were using were great, we continued with the care group's services. But one by one the manager, the main carer and her stand-in all left the care group in a space of three months.
One concern raised was that we were locking him in his house. We do lock his porch door as he has a habit of wandering and we have tried all the trackers, alarms, etc which don't work. Unless someone is in his porch to stop and advise him to not to go on his own, he'll walk until the cold air 'wakes him up' and he gets upset at having 'found' himself outside.
However the report did not mention that my dad was the one who came up with the idea, has keys to the same porch door, and that there are two other ways he has to leave his house in an emergency, so when I informed the Social Services of this and showed them the email I sent to the care group months before their report telling all this and they expressed no concern in reply, Social Services were surprised and commented that it was the second baseless report that investigated that day. .
This was one of three concerns they raised. The first was back in March 2018 and when Social Services asked them for details, Social Services realised that it was that pointless that they didn't even contact us.
I can tell anyone we have bent over backwards to look after dad and don't resent doing so. The only reason we can think of the director taking this step was because we weren't making that much money for her. We only use private care to fill in when a family member is not available to take care of dad and that had been two weekday evenings up to March this year when we wanted to cut that down to 1 weekday evening. When I informed the care group of this, the director said a term of contract states what we wanted went below their minimum care provision. Unfortunately for her there's a couple of us in the family who studied Law and we had read all the boring contract terms and asked her to point out where it said that. She couldn't and had to concede that she couldn't legally enforce a non-contact term on us like that.
This and other issues such as carers turning up a totally different time to what was agreed or it was different carer turning up instead of the one we were informed of, and the high standard of care we were paying for had dropped etc led to a complaint we made to them.
And we got the apologies and so on, then they replaced the new main carer, who we said we liked, with one who was not as experienced. Then due to an innocent mix-up we made which was corrected in about 10-20 minutes, another report was made to Social Services last month which included the point about the locking..
I have no problem about a care group's duty to care to report safeguarding concerns to the council, but they knew or must have know that this was not a genuine concern and thankfully we were able to prove this to the council.
Can't wait to June to finish. Not only has it been a chaotic month but it is also the end of the contract we had with this care group. So have you had had any falling out worse than that??!
The report wasn't from the (private) carers themselves, it was their management, most likely the director who has never met my dad or been to his house. We felt some time ago she wasn't as friendly as originally thought but, as we had little contact with her, and the care manager and carers we were using were great, we continued with the care group's services. But one by one the manager, the main carer and her stand-in all left the care group in a space of three months.
One concern raised was that we were locking him in his house. We do lock his porch door as he has a habit of wandering and we have tried all the trackers, alarms, etc which don't work. Unless someone is in his porch to stop and advise him to not to go on his own, he'll walk until the cold air 'wakes him up' and he gets upset at having 'found' himself outside.
However the report did not mention that my dad was the one who came up with the idea, has keys to the same porch door, and that there are two other ways he has to leave his house in an emergency, so when I informed the Social Services of this and showed them the email I sent to the care group months before their report telling all this and they expressed no concern in reply, Social Services were surprised and commented that it was the second baseless report that investigated that day. .
This was one of three concerns they raised. The first was back in March 2018 and when Social Services asked them for details, Social Services realised that it was that pointless that they didn't even contact us.
I can tell anyone we have bent over backwards to look after dad and don't resent doing so. The only reason we can think of the director taking this step was because we weren't making that much money for her. We only use private care to fill in when a family member is not available to take care of dad and that had been two weekday evenings up to March this year when we wanted to cut that down to 1 weekday evening. When I informed the care group of this, the director said a term of contract states what we wanted went below their minimum care provision. Unfortunately for her there's a couple of us in the family who studied Law and we had read all the boring contract terms and asked her to point out where it said that. She couldn't and had to concede that she couldn't legally enforce a non-contact term on us like that.
This and other issues such as carers turning up a totally different time to what was agreed or it was different carer turning up instead of the one we were informed of, and the high standard of care we were paying for had dropped etc led to a complaint we made to them.
And we got the apologies and so on, then they replaced the new main carer, who we said we liked, with one who was not as experienced. Then due to an innocent mix-up we made which was corrected in about 10-20 minutes, another report was made to Social Services last month which included the point about the locking..
I have no problem about a care group's duty to care to report safeguarding concerns to the council, but they knew or must have know that this was not a genuine concern and thankfully we were able to prove this to the council.
Can't wait to June to finish. Not only has it been a chaotic month but it is also the end of the contract we had with this care group. So have you had had any falling out worse than that??!
Last edited:
