Home care workers are important lynch pin in dementia care

Dementia experts have called for more joined up working between health and social care professionals, saying the home care worker is an important lynch pin whose views must be taken into account.

Bridget Warr, chief executive of United Kingdom Homecare Association, was speaking at a panel debate on dementia and care at The Alzheimer’s Show.

She revealed that sixty per cent of people that home care workers care for have some form of dementia and said: “Often it is the home care worker who is in a pivotal position in terms of a person’s care as they see what is happening every day. We need to encourage health and social care professionals to include home care workers in any discussions as they will know so much more about the person and their family”.

James Warner, chair of the Old Age Faculty at the Royal College of Psychiatrists and medical director of Red and Yellow Care, has seen first-hand the problems many people have in getting the right dementia care and agrees that home care is fundamental to improving the current state of dementia care in our country.

Also present at the debate, he said: “I am fed up of the silos we have to go through when we try and arrange dementia care. We did a count of the number of front doors that a person would have to go through in a London borough and it was 22. Let’s reduce that number and bringing home care into that is fundamental. Home care workers do a fantastic job but they do it in isolation.”

Ms Warr called this process of having to go through 22 doors to get the right care “horrifying”.

Jeremy Hughes, chief executive of Alzheimer’s Society, who was also at the debate, agreed that "we still have an enormously long way to go" in terms of joined up care.

Amazon shares more information than NHS

He said: “It seems extraordinary that a GP practice and a hospital can’t share their records. Amazon and Tesco club card share more information about people than the National Health Service. People have to explain their diagnosis all over again when they go into hospital.”

Another problem in giving people with dementia the right care is training and obviously there is also the big barrier of money with home care providers often commissioned by local authorities to provide care for only fifteen minute slots, according to Ms Warr, who said: “You can’t build a relationship with a person with dementia in 15 minutes”.

She would like to see more home care workers being given the right dementia training and said: “There is a lot of good quality training out there but it is not necessarily consistent”.

Hilda Hayo, chief admiral nurse at Dementia UK would also like to see more organisations working together and collaborating.

Care Certificate

She admitted that the new Care Certificate is bringing some consistency to the care sector but added: “I would like to see some good training standards imposed.”

“I have been working with the higher education network and we have found that some health and and social care professionals only get one hour of training on dementia throughout their whole working lives.”

The new Care Certificate was launched on 1 April 2015, following an independent review in February 2013, carried out by Camilla Cavendish, which proposed that all care workers undergo the same basic training, based on the best practice that already exists in the system, and get a standard ‘certificate of fundamental care’ before they can care for people unsupervised.

Andrea Sutcliffe, chief inspector for adult social care for the Care Quality Commission agreed that the new Care Certificate is a “very good starting point” but said “that is only the beginning”.

“The most depressing thing is when people tick the box to say they have done training but it is just online training done in one day. I would like to know what they understand about the Mental Capacity Act and the Deprivation of Liberty.”

James Warner concluded the debate by raising the issue of pay, saying: “This is some of the most difficult work we are doing in this country and the pay is parlous. Until we pay care workers properly we will be floundering.”