Madam, – Like everyone else I was horrified by the Prime Time portrayal of home care for elderly people in Ireland. However, I was also horrified by what I would consider to be the outrageously biased nature of the programme.
As a licence-payer I feel that I am entitled to investigative journalism with at least a semblance of objectivity and balance from our national broadcaster. However, the “balance” in Prime Time constituted one sentence stating that “Not all home care is bad but what you are about to see is what you, your parents or grandparents could be going through right now.”
What followed was 50 minutes of universally negative footage, interviews and comment focusing on a minimal number (four) of the “more than 150” home care agencies currently operating in the State. Are we expected to believe that such a small number is representative of the sector as a whole and if not why, after four months of preparatory work, were we not given a sense of how many of these agencies are providing an unacceptable level of service? One could be forgiven for taking the perception from Prime Time that every agency in the country is guilty in this regard.
The most important message of the programme – that regulation of the sector is urgently required, is indisputable. While I cannot condone breaches of recruitment practices as presented in the programme, I can, as a member of a family whose father has been looked after by Clontarf Home Care for the past six years, comment, from our experience, on the quality of care provided in our home by its home care team. A team of committed carers, many of whom have demonstrated extraordinary levels of dedication, has enabled him to remain in the familiar environment of his own home resulting in significant savings to the State.
Consequently, I consider it a grievous insult to the many dedicated carers at Clontarf Home Care that footage of predominantly one individual who was clearly struggling to cope with the demands of her post, be held up, without qualification, as the principal example of the service that its carers provide.
Furthermore, I consider it unreasonable to attempt to support perceived shortcomings of a service through reliance on a single anecdotal family testimony. Clearly not everyone has had the same experience from contact with home care services that our family has had and I fully support the need for regulation in the sector. However, as a fully paid up citizen of the State, I feel entitled to a greater degree of objectivity in investigative reports by our national broadcaster than was evident to me in that edition of Prime Time. – Yours, etc,
Madam, – As the daughter of a former client of the Clontarf Home Care team I was absolutely horrified by this week’s programme showing the abuse and neglect of the most needy people in our society.
My stomach churned and tears welled in my eyes at the thought that my dear old Dad could have been treated in such a manner.
He was lucky that he was very alert mentally and so could have reported any abuse to me, but as a stroke victim who couldn’t get out of bed in the morning unaided, he was often left waiting for hours while the carer either turned up late or not at all.
Many a morning I would get a phone call from him in Clontarf asking me to come and rescue him as he needed to go the toilet. I would chase over from Terenure in rush-hour traffic to find him, often distressed, trapped upstairs unable to do anything until someone arrived to help.
The first carer I met was to cook his lunch. This young man had never cooked a meal in his life and never once took his Walkman out of his ears. He never chatted to my Dad, just heated up food I had cooked from the freezer, put it down on the table and walked out the door. Useless! On many occasions I called in to the office of Clontarf Home Care to discuss my Dad’s needs only to be fobbed off and treated like a nuisance in an extremely rude manner by the lady who refused to be interviewed and others.
I blame the HSE which was trying to roll out these home care packages to cut so-called “bed-blockers”, and as usual had no real plan for the future and was quite happy to pay these care companies millions of taxpayers money so that Minister for Health Mary Harney could say she was doing a fantastic job.
Luckily after only two months of this haphazard care my Dad decided to go into residential care in the TLC nursing home in Santry where he was loved, cherished and respected and eventually died peacefully while being treated with the utmost dignity.
Most elderly people would prefer to stay in their own homes rather than go into residential care, and that is their right, but the care given by the State must be of the highest quality to ensure that the scenes from this week’s programme will never be repeated anywhere in this country.
Rolling out regulation at some stage next year is just not good enough for the frail, ill and mentally infirm elderly people of this country. – Yours, etc,
A chara, – RTÉ's programme Prime Time Investigatesscreened on December 13th will have rightly shocked many. I have been in care work as a professional, both as basis carer and at managerial level and I and my siblings also engaged part-time carers (most of them very good) and ourselves supplemented their care to our late parents.
It is clear that training, supervision and monitoring of carers by their employers and monitoring of the employers by the HSE and social services are the main areas of concern. It is not today or yesterday that these concerns surfaced, but addressing them was never seriously undertaken until this programme was screened.
Another major area of concern has been the low level of payment to many carers (in some cases well below the present minimum wage) and the long hours worked without a break, also illegal but in addition dangerous to the client and to the worker.
Remedying these factors costs money. The drive to lower State funding to services (and to home carers), along with proposals to lower the minimum wage level and the increasing privatisation of services, will, I’m sorry to say, exacerbate these problems, whether the HSE carries out a thorough investigation or not. – Yours, etc,