Older models and care home leaflets: starting Greyamble blogging after a gap

A friend is thinking about a care home, so we are looking at leaflets. It occurs to me that the proliferation of need for care homes is going to be a bonanza for older photographic models for the pics that all their leaflets need for grey-haired and slightly wrinkled but lively-looking and positive residents. All looking, I must say, more with-it that most care home residents I come across.

You'll have gathered that I've taken a gap from Greyamble blogging to do other things for a while, but I'm starting up more regularly again now.

Christian care home/bungalow scheme preserves scale and environment

 Here's another of my occasional pics of care homes in the locality. This one is (from the front) a well-preserved Edwardian house, and run by a charity for Christians. Note the in-keeping handrails for the stepped entrance, but this is not the crucial point, there's a flat entrance at the side and the steps preserve the Edwardian style at the front. This is a very attractive environment, although you might not fancy the care home rooms  with the side view that you can see on the left below.

Another desirable aspect of this scheme is that the garden has been changed to provide a series of bungalows.So there are more and less independent aspects to it. It also fits the scale of the area much more than the overlarge luxy private scheme I blogged about a while ago. Because it relates well to the area, and it does not seem so keen to make money, it looks a more attractive prospect for living. I wonder how hard you have to work at being Christian?

Search 'care homes' to find previous posts on care provision in the Sutton area.

Older people should have a stimulating life even if they need care

An interesting case study of the misuse of a Deprivation of Liberties Safeguards (DoLS) authorisation, which demonstrates the importance of good practice. Care homes and hospitals have to take out these authorisations if they're going to stop you doing things that normally you would be free to do, for example go out on your own if you're unsafe. My view is that it's not good enough just to comply with the safeguards; here you have a man who was legitimately deprived of his freedom, because he was at risk when he was living on his own with dementia. But once admitted to a care home, they did not work at trying to give him as much freedom within the constraints that were necessary, and so lumbered him with a more miserable life than they needed to do. I can't say often enough that just caring for older people won't do, you have to give them a worthwhile life. Even though someone has their freedom curtailed in some respects, it's still possible to give them freedoms in many other aspects of their lives. Social workers should be supporting care staff to do that, even if the managers of the care homes isn't good enough to manage it on their own.

This comes from the annual Care Quality Commission review of the operation of the Deprivation of Liberty Safeguards. The development of these safeguards has been going very slowly, and it is suspected that a lot of care homes and hospitals are breaking the law. It seems that, while there is some good practice, there are still a lot of people who do not know about the safeguards, and so cannot operate them correctly. Although there is confusion about what deprivation of liberty is, what the DoLS scheme does is force you to think it through. The CQC review provides a lot of interesting case studies and citations to recent legal cases, and comprehensive links to guidance.

Link to the CQC review.

Why people with dementia should be involved in worship

An interesting leaflet from MHA (the mainly Methodist organisation for housing and care for older people) and the CCOA (Christian Council on Aging) which I picked up while passing through a Methodist Home (this is what they call themselves; they seem to have dropped the word that the 'A' in the name originally stood for).

It is about worship and people with dementia, and is one of a number of leaflets about spirituality; the CCOA has a huge variety. The point is that although people with dementia may not have the same sophistication of appreciation of their Christianity that they once had, they can often appreciate the involvement in ritual that has been present for important parts of their lives. Worship for people with dementia, according to the leaflet, should be fairly brief, involving, use familiar materials and use well-known symbols, such as candles. Don't close your eyes when praying - it makes people feel cut off. the leaflet suggests suitable hymns and readings for particular themes.

Link to the leaflet on the MHA website (scroll down for downloads).

Governments don't collect data about older people, so they can't plan for their needs

This interesting map (drawn from UN population data) compares the proportion of the population in different countries that are and will be older people in 2012 and 2030. The proportion is rising almost everywhere. It comes from an interesting Global AgeWatch information briefing which says that governments and others are not collecting data about older people. They concentrate on younger people, so older people get missed out of the planning for policy and services.

Link to HelpAge download site, so that you can look at the briefing.

Statistics on grandparent care

It’s always interesting to look through a pile of statistics. The organisations Grandparents Plus and AgeUK dug through various reports on grandparents providing childcare. Here are some highlights:

• The value of grandparental childcare in the UK in 2010/11 was £7.3 billion, up from £3.9 billion in 2004.
• In 2011, 28% of families where both parent work used grandparent childcare, 25% of lone parents, and 14% of non-working families.
• Nearly two thirds (63%) of all grandparents with grandchildren under 16 are providing some childcare, with one in five (19%) grandmothers providing at least 10 hours a week.
• Employment rates are lower for grandmothers than for women who are not grandmothers. While grandparents generally view providing childcare as a positive choice, there is some evidence of women giving up work to provide childcare.
• European data indicates that the grandmothers most likely to provide childcare are those who are younger, fit, healthy, and with young grandchildren.

The organisations say:

most informal childcare is provided by grandmothers aged 55 to 64 who are not working, because at the moment there are many more grandmothers in this group. However a significant minority of grandmothers are already combining work with childcare: and grandparents who are working are more likely to say they look after their grandchildren than those who are retired, reflecting the fact that working grandparents are generally younger and their grandchildren are also younger. As the proportion of working grandmothers increases, it will be of growing importance that they are able to combine work with supporting families through providing grandchild care, to avoid the emergence of a care gap.

Robot cleaners will lead to cuts in human contact in care homes and social care services

A Guardian article about robots to do the cleaning in care homes in Denmark sounds like a good idea. the person promoting the idea (which is presented a bit cautiously by the Guardian) suggests it means that staff have more time to give to interpersonal relationships with residents. But the rest of the article is about worries about Danish cuts in the social services.

Which suggests to me that it will be a bit like having computers supplied to social workers over the last 20 years. Claims that it will lead to a reduction n paperwork proved to be nonsense. It just meant that the social workers had to do all the administrative work that was previously done by clerical workers. This led to extra stress for social workers and time taken from working with people and passed across to working with computers. It also led to cuts in the availability of routine clerical jobs for people with ordinary qualifications.

Robot cleaners will be the same.  Once they're efficient and cheap, they will be used to cut routine staff from care homes, who provide a bit of extra humanity and human contact. And eventually they'll be handed out to older people in their own homes, so they will lose one of the little bits of human contact that they get from people doing their housework. And of course they'll also have to buy them or contribute to the cost, and won't have the alternative of opting for a human being, because that will be more expensive than a robot. And then, nobody will have a list of human cleaners, so the possibility will be lost anyway.

Link to the Guardian article.