Having to start a new thread because I got quite a few messages last night on one of my older posts, but this morning, Charlesh47 decided to close down that thread before I had a chance to respond.
My case is a lengthy and ongoing one, where, in a nutshell, my mother died due to poor quality home care from an inadequate care provider, and I haven’t been able to get anyone to take the case seriously so far.
This is the update I was drafting in response to comments left by @jamie_2107, @Michael_1910123, and @Greta when I got notice my thread had been closed down…
Many thanks for your interest and replies. Since I last posted I have set up a website and now have an inbox full of people who have experienced the same sort of issues, not only with the same care provider but with others across the country. This isn’t really Just a case of challenging the CQC. It’s about the fact that the council do not seem to be conducting any oversight of their commissioned care provider and people are suffering.
In my mother’s case, the council withheld her right to Direct Payments and, unknown to us at the time upheld a Poor Practice Concern raised by the GP that my mother had developed health issues to poor care standards, still, they did nothing, wouldn’t even allow her to transfer the care package to her own choice who were ready and willing to take it on. Told us the only way out was via Direct Payments and then never processed the application.
In the end, the Ombudsman did not acknowledge the full complaint I made but instead decided to only look at the issues the council was willing to acknowledge, which was that they failed to process the Direct Payment. The Ombudsman inexplicably decided there was no fault whatsoever with a safeguarding enquiry, which the council did acknowledge, in part, was not conducted properly as some administrative errors were made. They said there was nothing wrong with the enquiry itself even though it clearly shows the officer delegated the enquiry to the agency to investigate themselves, allowed my mum to be returned to the care of this agency subject to an active investigation without capacity and without best interests being considered, Not to mention that policy was not followed in relation to timescales when things should have happened.
Mum was readmitted and died with that safeguarding enquiry active, and it triggered no interest whatsoever. That brings us to how the council social worker insisted upon an unsafe discharge just to ‘save the council money’ The notes show they could not care less about safeguarding, capacity or the fact that there was another agency she could have gone home with. Instead, they implied suspicions about why safeguarding had been raised and did not acknowledge that Mum was admitted and recorded as lacking capacity and was determined to send her home to an agency currently under investigation for neglect. No one was listening to my protests at the time.
The safeguarding enquiry was only initiated a month after Mum died and records show I was only contacted to confirm the referral after the safeguarding officer had already closed the case down with the other parties. It scares me that people are left at risk of harm in this way. What is the point of statutory safeguarding if it doesn’t work or isn’t followed? CQC are recording ‘near misses’ by this care provider but no meaningful enforcement because this care provider is a ‘prime’ provider, which means they are the sole care provider for a given area, and any enforcement would cause problems for the council’s delivery of services. This is why I think CQC is a joke. The Ombudsman has repeatedly failed to respond to a service complaint and further review requests.
I don’t know if it is good news, but my MP has agreed to pass the matter on to their ministerial colleagues. The word is this won’t be very effective for a single case, so I urge anyone who has faced any issues with council-commissioned home care to get in touch with me, even anonymously, could help move things along.
I’m not going away; the advice is now to take out a raft of civil suits against the council and care provider and name CQC as co-defendant. It’s now about exposure to the issues in the hope of getting ministers to look at it properly. I really can’t rest knowing that the council took a stance of making us feel we were the only one with an issue when clearly we weren’t. I honestly believe that my mother would still be here if they had just done what they were supposed to. I can’t rest knowing other people are going through the same sort of hell they put us through.
Poor quality care providers appear to be able to kill people due to poor standards, and no one gives a toss; what kind of world do we live in where that is allowed to happen? One of the worst parts of this is that Mum died shortly before COVID was even a thing, and it’s taken this long just to get through the complaints process. I spent two years, as did my mum, begging for release from this care provider and was completely ignored. It’s not fair that anyone has to fight so hard just for the right to safe care and treatment.
If I can help anyone else by sharing this experience, I am very happy to do so.