Hello Everyone.
I posted a bit of a rant/vent a couple of years ago that I was at my wits end because the care agency that the council made us have after mum had suffered a stroke which meant she couldn’t walk anymore were just so awful that it was getting very depressing for everyone involved.
thara_1910 very kindly suggested that it was unprofessional and to complain and I did, I complained to the agency who ignored me, I complained to the social worker who agreed and told them to broker out the service, which they didn’t do. We applied for Direct Payments, the council failed to process. I wrote a formal complaint, which the council lost. I raised a safeguarding concern that was resolved with barely an investigation.
Then it all became the stuff of nightmares. Mum suddenly started to look unwell. Looking back she did seem a little quieter than usual, but there wasn’t any indication that she was unwell and I put it down to the issues with the carers.
I queried it with the carers, who stated that she’d been off her food for some time, didn’t write it in the book though, didn’t escalate it, didn’t refer it to anyone else. I immediately got her GP on to it and she ended up in the hospital who discharged her a week later, despite an active safeguarding investigation against the care agency, very unwell and then she was readmitted a couple of days after that and died about a week later.
It turned out she had a kidney infection all that time and the carers/agency weren’t telling anyone else about her symptoms, which I have more recently discovered included blood in her urine that also went ignored. She wouldn’t have had that infection if the agency had done what they were supposed to in relation to repeated poor performance concerns about personal hygiene needs, they weren’t being met.
So I raise hell. I go through two stages of complaints with the council and the responses were unbelievably disinterested and half-hearted but ultimately claim nothing wrong with their care provider. I escalate it to the CQC and the ombudsman. The Ombudsman is currently investigating, so we will have to see what they come back with.
The CQC has conducted a focused investigation and again found them to still be doing all the things that we were complaining about when they were supposedly looking after mum. Three inspections in a row and they are still showing no improvement and are in breach of the same regulations plus a regulation 12, and the CQC have only rated them as requiring improvement and to again provide a plan to improve.
This feels like a kick in the head if I am honest. I would have really liked to see inadequate and special measures, or better still get rid of the rotten business so no one else dies, but that seems to be overly optimistic.
Does anyone know if there is a way for an individual, as a previous service user, to challenge a CQC report outcome? All the advice I can see online is geared toward the agencies who want to complain that their ratings are too low to raise them, but I do think the report is factually flawed and can’t find any advice on how to address it.
I’m not going to let this go and I will keep on escalating it through whatever channel I can until I get some justice for mum and stop agencies like this from contributing to anyone else’s death.
If anyone has links to any other agencies or groups that would be interested in hearing about my experience do let me know.