I guess much depends on individual cases. I’ve had experiences of cases where families had concerns about a relative and felt them vulnerable so were requesting that social services have them taken into care or away from their current accommodation.
One lady (amongst many other things) insisted on using the stairs despite frequent falls and continued to smoke cigarettes in her bedroom at night despite almost setting the place on fire twice. Her behaviour was bizarre to say the least and she was assessed at length by social workers, OT’s, the Older People’s Mental Health Team etc to ascertain her level of mental capacity.
Despite everyone having the same worries, little could be done because she had full mental capacity, the ability to make her own decisions and understood the level of risk at which she put herself. Granted the level of risk was considerable and a concern to most but nevertheless, she had sufficient mental capacity to understand this and make her own choices – even though they were very poor ones.
Her family couldn’t understand why their relative couldn’t be made to move into care because of a fear they might get injured / ill / be otherwise at risk and considered social workers to be negligent in failing to have her detained.
On the other hand, I’ve recently had experience of a vulnerable lady with dementia who came into our residential home via social services emergency duty team and the local police following the discovery of her at home alone and without electricity, food, money and very confused - not knowing where she was or where her son (main carer) had gone.
We had numerous problems with this lady’s son over the course of the next few months whom it was discovered had drained out all her bank accounts and still had her bank books and cards etc. Long story short – Social Services assumed responsibility for all her finances and a safeguarding alert was raised into his suitability to care for her.
He took issue with his Mum being with us from day one and started demanding that she either go home with him or be moved elsewhere because he didn’t feel we were looking after her. She’d settled, was eating well and had gained some of the weight she’d lost and was generally much better physically and mentally. When her son wasn’t around, she said she wanted to stay with us and even told her social worker the same in private one afternoon. When asked what she wanted to do when he was there, she sheepishly said she was happy to do whatever her son wanted.
With the son putting the damage on and really kicking up a stink, social services agreed to her transferring to another home which I was extremely annoyed about.
The social workers seemed unwilling to take on board our concerns that the situation about him being unhappy with her being in care would continue wherever she went and that it was not in her best interests to continue moving her from one place to another.
In my opinion, moving her to another home at the request of her son (who was the subject of an ongoing safeguarding investigation) was totally inappropriate.
They failed her completely.
