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There's a lot of experience of coping with elderly parents on here so I wonder if anyone can offer some advice.
I have an elderly relative, 80 this year. They live alone and I basically help them out when I can. They can't really cope with the internet so mostly I help with online tasks and the like, oddjobs etc. Anyway, they have realised that at some point in the nearish future thy may not be able to manage looking after themselves and are contemplating employing a live in carer. They have no idea of how it might work, or what a carer could do other than 'look after me'.
Has anyone any experience of doing this for the relatives? I've searched online and found some useful info but it would be useful to hear first hand experience. From what I can see, they might be best finding someone privately rather than using an agency, but that comes with its own disadvantages. Cost wise I can make a guess at what it may be, but again any experiences would be useful.
I'd say a large part of their concern is simply not having someone to talk to, but i'm not sure a carer would just sit and natter, but I could be wrong.
Anyway, all advice appreciated
Currently have it in place for my Mum. We use an agency so it is their responsibility to find holiday / illness cover and there are two carers generally who work week on / week off with some others who occasionally do that holiday / illness cover. I just couldn't manage it myself and the only people we know who have done so lived close to their relative and worked part time so could sort any absences.
At £950/wk it isn't cheap. With the cost of the house on top, it is twice what a nursing home might be, but she and my Dad saved so they could have a comfortable old age. He's dead, but as long as she can still appreciate being at home, she will. I think we'll probably have done 3 years of this by the time she eventually goes in a care home.
Carer cleans, shops, cooks, sorts medication, chats, laundry, arranges work around the house. And gets 2 hours off each day. Before the carer came in, Mum was deteriorating fast, but with the carer she has been stable and outlasted any expectation we had for her.
Could a stepping stone help? Going from you helping out when you can, to permanent live in care seems like a big jump. It's good they they are looking for help as it can often be too late.
If there are specific tasks that they need help with then you could have home care, you can start small and easily increase the number or duration of each visit as required. There is also assistive technology to help within certain tasks but this won't have the face to face contact.
You will get a better service going privately unfortunately. Social services care having been cut and privatised to almost nothing
Its expensive - and you don't need to go to full 24/7 care right away
I would still make contact with social services anyway - they will be able to help
If it's just help with the internet, odd jobs and company, how about more of a housemate set up?
I seem to remember a number of schemes where younger people live with older people for cheap or free rent and do a set number of hours work of company a week.
Depends where your relative lives of course.
It wouldn't be a long term solution but maybe could work for now until the person needs more care.
They could have a carer visit as well as and when needed.
There are folk round here getting 4 visits per day from the NHS Care at Home team, plus support from other agencies. It might be worth looking at this, us topping it up with some Private help, like shopping etc. It's a compromise away from full live-in care, which many folk find hard to adapt to (and just don't want).
I agree with tj, it's worth going to the local council because even if they can't currently help, they can give options and advice. It's within their interests to support as self funders and early intervention help save money in the long run.
There are folk round here getting 4 visits per day from the NHS Care at Home team, plus support from other agencies
The in-laws get that in East Renfrewshire and it was enough for almost a year. But they have gone very rapidly (since May) from that being entirely adequate to nowhere near enough.
If you can get that up and running, you already need to be thinking of what the next stage will be and when because it can happen pretty fast. The in-laws have gone from that OK in May to the conversation now being live in care or care home.
We have pretty much the same set up as what OldBloke wrote. We have a private agency for my father-in-law. About £4K a month (so a bit more than a care home adding in the cost of running the house). I don’t think my FiL would have survived a care home to this point. Expensive but a much better quality of life (if it’s a viable alternative) than care homes. My mother when she was alive didn’t get on with being institutionalised. We didn’t have any options (she was bedridden by this stage) and she was quite miserble.
We did not go down the live in carer route, but did have about 4-5 months of 24 hour care, one person for the day shift and another for the night. It was all arranged through an agency so staff illness/holidays were covered (Covid would have made private arrangements hell, even the agency struggled, but they never failed)
In terms of what carers will do, it depends. Two different agencies and lots of different carers showed me that some got bored and went looking for things to do such as washing, cleaning and ironing, others just sat playing on their phone. Some refused to cook anything other than microwaveable meals, others got my relative in to the kitchen to help make fresh food and even to do some baking. ‘Company’ was also varied, one of the youngest would sit down for a cup of tee and a chat, another would watch TV with my relative and then chat about it. Others hid in the room next door unless needed.
The only exception was money. Almost none of them would get involved with money. The only exception was one who would buy ‘essentials’ on her way home and bring a receipt in the next day.
Nothing to add other than pretty much all of the live in carers I've met have been women from South Africa employed by an agency, they appeared very dedicated.
My wife works in CaH. She has a list of tasks but often (pre-Covid) it was as much about maintaining social contact as anything else, so sitting down with a cuppa was an important part of it.
We had a live-in carer arrangement for my father for several months before his last couple of weeks, arranged through an agency in the county town. This became necessary when my stepmother realised that he was getting a bit too difficult for her to cope with, her having bad knees and hips, for instance. To say nothing of a short fuse.
The agency basically had a 'pool' of carers who they could allocate to him, each of whom would do a stint of a week or so at a time before needing a break and handing over to another for a few days. In the end it turned out that my stepmother (who, to be honest is bloody hard work at the best of times) only really saw eye-to-eye with one of the carers, and would only really trust that particular lassie. She made life diffcult for any of the others, and made it clear to them that they weren't 'doing things right'... so it was a bit of a trial. That said, the carer was also acting as a bit of day-to-day company for stepmother too, as Dad's sense and onversational abilities were very much waning by that stage.
There were no financials involved, in terms of the carer needing to take any responsibilty for household cash or shopping etc, except she'd occasionally pop out to get a bottle of milk or such like.
In essence her original responsibilities involved things like makign sure he took his tablets, helping him eat, helping with toilet and washing, dressing/undressing, etc. But it evolved as his health took a downturn, and was never really documented and laid out.
The cost was about £1200 weekly for the live-in service, and that was a couple of years ago.