Increasing care for an elderly parent

[markirl]

Hi folks,

Looking for some advice on increasing home care. My grandmother is in her late 90s, still living in her own home in Yorkshire and has very limited mobility due to a bad accident 30 years ago. She had been remarkably independent up until about 5 years ago when we started using a care agency to come to the house for 1 hour, 5 times/week.

As we live in Ireland, C-19 has posed a challenge as my mother has been unable to travel as much as she used to (she used to go over once a month). Combined with this, my grandmother's mobility has decreased and she is no longer able to get in/out of bed or dress herself without assistance. Due to this, she hasn't been going to bed and generally her quality of life is deteriorating quite quickly. She has always been very mentally sharp but is now getting confused and appears to be having vivid dreams that she thinks are real - my belief is that this is from lack of quality sleep and also much more limited human interaction than she is used to. Moving in with a family member is off the cards at the moment.

With C-19, we have limited options to increase her quality of life, which we believe are:
1. Increase to 7 days of care to 2 hours in morning, 2 hours in evening to make sure that she continues a routine.
2. Explore permanent live-in care for 5 days/week and use an agency for a few hours on Sat/Sunday.
3. Move her to a home - either public or private (the latter will require selling her house)

To date, the care has been self funded, costing approx £25-30/hour. There isn't unlimited money but reasonable cost is finance-able by the family. The agency has broadly been OK but it's a very expensive way of doing it and we know that the carers only end up with a fraction of this (we believe £9/hour). I would like to explore directly hiring a carer to get financial benefit for both participants but it also has its disadvantages. Has anyone tried this in the past?

Has anyone investigated permanent live in carers in the past?

Any advice from anyone in a similar situation would be hugely appreciated.

Thanks in advance

[Mr Tidy]

My mother was 91 in 2013 when we first started paying for private carers to help her get up, fed and dressed on weekday mornings and cook her a meal in the evening twice a week. Otherwise we would have had the opposite problem - she wouldn't have got up! My sister and niece were both working full-time so could only do evenings and weekends, and I was still working and living over 30 miles away but we did her evening meals at least 3 times a week. Back then it was costing £20 an hour, but the carers were only getting £8 IIRC.

We did stumble across someone who was a carer (via AGE UK) for another resident in the same block of retirement flats and employed her directly for a while but she became unreliable turning up late, or not at all, and of course there was no back-up if she went sick, etc. Unlike the private company who would at least send someone out. So given how far away you are I think employing directly might be problematic, unless your grandmother is up to monitoring their performance and reporting it to you.

Over the years Mum needed ever increasing care so we upped the hours for private carers until in July 2019 Mum had to move into a residential home because it really wasn't safe for her to be living on her own. We found a charity-run one for £3,300 a month.

A few years before that the mother of a mate of mine died and her partner couldn't cope on his own so his family employed live-in carers which cost about the same, but sadly the spare room in Mum's flat just wasn't big enough for that option.

Latterly Mum had issues with "dreams" too like telling me the doorbell had been ringing in the night but I don't believe that was due to lack of sleep, just her deteriorating condition.

If your grandmother owns her home she won't usually qualify for a place in a public home unless her assets are less than £23,250, or there is an NHS assessment that gives her an entitlement on medical grounds.

We fell behind on payments in March as Mum's savings were depleted, but thankfully managed to catch up in May when the sale of her flat completed (luckily she had registered LPAs so we could do that). And the home had an assessment done in July that meant the NHS started paying that month.

Sadly Mum passed away on 3 November anyway at 98 and 7 months so we had a distanced funeral service. I really won't miss 2020 at all, but if that helps you in any way maybe some good has come of that experience.

[wisbech]

markirl said:

Hi folks,

To date, the care has been self funded, costing approx £25-30/hour. There isn't unlimited money but reasonable cost is finance-able by the family. The agency has broadly been OK but it's a very expensive way of doing it and we know that the carers only end up with a fraction of this (we believe £9/hour). I would like to explore directly hiring a carer to get financial benefit for both participants but it also has its disadvantages. Has anyone tried this in the past?

Has anyone investigated permanent live in carers in the past?

Any advice from anyone in a similar situation would be hugely appreciated.

Thanks in advance

National insurance, sick pay, holiday pay, maternity leave, health & safety (is there equipment and is the person suitably trained to lift up your mother if she falls for example). Becoming an employee is no simple task.

I know that one of my mother's elderly next door neighbours had an arrangement with a Zimbabwean couple down on their luck (think asylum seekers). They lived with her, and had a system of cash in hand payments agreed (i.e. X pounds if woken to get her to the toilet at night, Y pounds per meal made) and were off the books as far as I know for tax & social security. Seemed to work for all concerned - the old lady had spent time in Zimbabwe which is how the connection started.

Edited by wisbech on Tuesday 29th December 09:58

Edited by wisbech on Tuesday 29th December 10:01