Hi. I had one a few months back. My experience was mixed really. However I wonder if my experience may help you to overcome any worries about what to expect. My needs are very different, however what hasn’t worked for me may work for you.
So the main points I get out of it are the fact that I now have someone who rings me once a month or so. They ring me for an hour and discuss how things are going.
I also got a carers card which gives me discount for certain businesses in the area. I have been ambivalent with this one. Although, discounts are great. The problem I have is the card only works for my councils area. Unfortunately I work over in the next county (technically). It’s complicated, the city where I live is considered its own place and is run by a seperate council. Everywhere around (except south where the river is) it is considered by a different council. With me working in the different county I’m not getting the best of the benefits.
I also find the locations aren’t brilliant. However this varies area to area and what you are in to. Im a geeky person in my mid 20s, so there’s not much for me except the occasional 10 per cent of a hairdresser’s appointment. I also get 10 per cent of certain sweet shops which is probably the best one, though I haven’t used it. There are also lots of cafes on there. So if you like those things it really helps. There may be more choice closer to you.
I was also given £200 to use on activities and getting respite. It’s not much but it helps. I suppose in this day and age, an extra £200 to spend on activities is abit of a blessing.
Other than that, it’s been varied. They are well aware of support groups in the area and are great with benefits. However, with me being a full time working carer, the services are inaccessible to me. I am also not entitled to any benefit, apparently I earn too much. (Yeah, I don’t know who came to that conclusion.) I’m only just affording a room in a shared house on my full-time wages.
Like you say too, it seems pointless if the person you care for won’t accept help. I kind of agree there. My mum has been difficult and it’s been hard to get her help. Basically there has been so much stigma, stereotypes and all sorts.
However, my saving grace is they know how to be abit more approachable with those matters.
Carers Assessments can be useful even when the person you’re caring for won’t accept help. A lot depends on the circumstances. One thing that Chris_22081 was offered was a £200 grant. Now that might be used for any number of things. If it were available to me (my city doesn’t have it), I’d use it for a head and shoulder massage. I get a lot of tension there and being able to afford a massage like that on a semi-regular basis would be brilliant. Might help to keep the migraines down a bit. I know a carer who bought some art materials they couldn’t have afforded so that they could take up art again and use that as their “me” time. Neither of those would affect your mum but might be something that would help you. Just an example - but I hope you get the idea.
Yes indeed Charles. I am waiting to receive the grant - as usual it takes up to a month to come through. I will be using it to supplement the gym membership which is already discounted by the Council as Graham was referred by our GP, even though he cannot currently go due to his ailments! I am still trying to get along which I think does me some good.
Well here we are a month after I put a complaint in writing about the Carer’s Assessment and not a dicky bird from the Council. No acknowledgement of my complaint or any response.
Just sent off a formal Complaint using their online service to see if anything happens. I am sure they will say the have no record of my complaint - as the guy who opened it probably destroyed it… Well they will find I do not just go away and crawl under a stone - Lots of people would give up but they have rattled the wrong cage this time! ARRGGHHHHH!!!
I share your frustration. I’m sure a lot of the problem is the current practice of not having a permanently allocated social worker. Someone is allocated, does, or does not, do what they are supposed to do, then closes the file.
This is not supposed to happen with “Older” people, but I don’t think Hampshire where I live has ever read that! There’s a lot more they haven’t read too!!!
I had enough! Surprisingly the online complaint elicited a response! They admit they have my Feedback form and simply said they have referred my ONLINE complaint to the right department… I replied asking if they would kindly confirm that my letter of complaint five weeks earlier HAD been received as it was sent with the feedback form.
Just heard that - yes - the letter was received as well, but had not been actioned by anyone or passed on to a Manager or the Complaints Team. The lady says ‘we have had some issues with that team recently, compounded by sickness and Annual Leave’. Oh give me a break! Excuses excuses.
I feel like seeing how far I can take THAT issue as well as it beggars belief that they juts ignore a complaint - probably hoping it will go away. The complaint is about them LYING about the process they say THEY followed and now they come up with more excuses…
If South Glos Council was a business it would go bankrupt overnight as NO-ONE would use its services.
I know I’ve read that formal complaints should be acknowledged promptly and resolved in about 4 weeks. Can’t remember where offhand. Maybe someone else can?
South Glos publishes that it acknowledges all complaints within 5 working days and gives full response within 20. They have only TODAY started dealing with my written complaint which they confirm they received on 20th Jan…and that was only because I followed up.
Sign of the times I suppose but useless when they are supposed to be helping us unpaid F/t Carers - and then they use excuses like 'due to Staff Leave…Must be nice to get paid holidays… or just a holiday…
Chris, I shall never forget being told by Social Services that my son was not eligible for a holiday scheme which would have given me just 3 days on my own, in a full year. The Childrens Services Head that told me this was brown as a berry having spent the previous 2 weeks sunning herself in the Caribbean!!! This was especially galling as I’d been the parent rep on the committee that had arranged the holiday scheme, devoting many hours to setting it up. The same happened the following year (apparently my name had been removed from the list as I’d made a complaint). The following year I was so ill that my GP told SSD that my son MUST become a boarder at school to give me a break, which SSD had to fund. SSD seem to forget that if carers get ill they might have to fund the full cost of residential care!
I know we were taken away for a weekend break, and that was really special, but it wasn’t a break from me - packing, driving, still 24/7 caring, packing, driving home… Our Friend who paid can’t quite see that as he thinks nothing of a quick bit of packing and loves driving.
As for Carer’s Support Service - I have no confidence in them after this. I will be kicking the Council again to ask what they are doing about their own staff who failed to act on my Complaint letter - all they have said is they have had issues with that Team compounded by holidays and sickness. Not an excuse as the Team Leader/Manager/Supervisor is PAID to deal with that sort of issue.
They outsource the Carers Assessments and are trying to pass the blame to the CSS but I am not going to let them get away with it.as it was one of their direct employees who wrote the letter I received.
Why is it that in this day and age we STILL have to fight for everything?
And when you ring a Service you get ‘we are experiencing unusually high call volumes…’ They are not unusually high they are the same every day - you just don’t allocate enough resources because we have no choice but to wait for you.
Eeek! I just heard my soapbox start to creak undeer the strain!
Chris, a stock phrase I use is “the council has a duty to organise it’s resources efficiently and effectively in order to meet it’s statutory duties”…In your case I’d add regardless of sickness and holidays.
Councils have a legal obligation to have and publish their complaints policy. The policy itself is not legally binding, and many are (unofficially) hiding behind Covid, it seems: for example, our local council is still operating under the Covid restrictions even though everything is supposed to be running as normal. Great way to save cash and to make things difficult.
But if their complaints system is working under different rules due to Covid they MUST publish that: they can’t leave the official policy up and ignore it. The problem is that then your only redress is to go through the whole procedure before you can go to the Ombudsman. I’m certain it’s done to wear people down. That said, I like BB’s stock phrase: I used to use something similar in that I compared our little service and the contracts we had that forced us to deliver the full service even if we had staff off sick. One year that left me working 60 hours a week for three months.
I am ahead with the right phrases as my original letter of complaint - which was ‘conveniently filed’ - and almost made it into the waste bin - pointed out that as the information in their letter was clearly inaccurate and misleading they were failing in their duty under the 2014 Act and I would like to know what action they intended to take to correct their error in my case and to prevent the Council from Breaching the Act in future.
They seem to think that by passing my original letter to the ‘Contractor’ they are in the clear - BUT my complaint was aimed at South Glos Council as it is THEM who have the Statutory Duty and they cannot pass that responsibility to a Contractor.
I will be reminding them that I am STILL waiting for a clear explanation as it was one of THEIR Officers - and not the Contractor who wrote to me with the misinformation. Just because they have told me (in writing - oh dear!!) that they have had problems with ‘That Team’ does not excuse, explain or get them off the hook.
Chris - insufficient monitoring of contract compliance. We used to have annual visits where they checked our paperwork, chose cases at random to read through, went through our record-keeping and storage procedures, health and safety compliance, staff records, training records, everything. I half expected to have my teeth examined. They also checked all of our complaints in that year to see how we dealt with them. The worst year we had for complaints, we had three: one was partially upheld, another was purely and provably malicious, the other was a misunderstanding. I had chapter and verse on what happened, how I found out, what I did as the complaint investigator at every stage. In the case of the malicious complaint, the person complaining had shared photographs on Facebook that proved that they were lying. They forgot that sharing to a Facebook friend often opens up their shared material to that person’s friends…and the text supporting the photos gave a very different version of events to the one reported to me. Our contract compliance contact was quite impressed that we cleared all our complaints within ten days - and two of them in less than a week.
Thing is, it takes a lot of work but I owed it to everyone involved to deal with each situation as a matter of urgency. Councils have teams to do that. Might be worth putting in a Freedom of Information Act request to find out how many complaints the social services team has had against them each year since 2019. If there’s been a drop (through binning or ignoring, or a genuine downward trend), then there’s no excuse for not dealing with the complaint in a timely manner (there isn’t anyway, but it never hurts to point out the detail). If there’s been an increase - even with binning the odd one - then there’s an issue of quality or a failure to manage expectations. Either is unacceptable.
FOI request is a good idea Charles. I will put together a request which is clear and one which they can’t dodge around and give a ‘woolly’ answer! I’ve had one of those in the past and had to submit a much tighter, clearer request. The danger is they provide an answer ‘we refer you to an answer given on xyz date as this is deemed to be close in nature to your request.’ Or worse ‘the information you request is not regularly collated and it is believed that to give full details would involved excess staff time to collate.’. I know they have to publish details of how many complaints are made and the outcomes but the are past-masters (mistresses, but that always sounds dodgy) at avoidance.
Perhaps when I get a few spare minutes - after all you know how many of those there are in a day - I might trawl their website (which is horrible to navigate - even Elected Members say it is rubbish despite a multimillion pound revamp a few years ago) to see where they publish the stats and see what is showing.
The big excuse is going to be referring it all to the Contractor which is just not on and NO excuse for their crap service.
but they have rattled the wrong cage this time! ARRGGHHHHH!!! 
