Viewing 40 posts - 1 through 40 (of 53 total)
  • Yet another death, and a huge fine
  • project
    Free Member

    http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-birmingham-12225802

    Another nursing home failure,another death due to lack of care.

    and why does it take 2 years plus for them to be prosecuted, It makes me so angry.

    TandemJeremy
    Free Member

    You really do have a bee in your bonnet about this. Yes its a sad case but do you have any idea of the difficulties involved in nursing homes?

    You ire should be directed at the (tory) politicians who decided that privatising all long term care of the elderly was the right thing to do and then paying nursing homes less than the cost of care to look after people with no private means

    Also you might want to protest about the (tory) politicians who are downgrading the inspection of homes as onerous inspections stop their pals making profits.

    finally BUPA is a charity and the BUPA nursing homes don’t make a significant profit – any surpluses actually go to charity work.

    Its a basic fact – you get what you pay for and less than £500 a week gets not a lot.

    Want good long term care =- be prepared to pay properly for it

    iDave
    Free Member

    holy bollox, i agree with ‘him’ ^^^ 😯

    I’m so sorry everyone else, TJ, is………. CORRECT!!!

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    Xylene
    Free Member

    How hard can it be to run a nursing home?

    Let the old people sit in their wee, nick the money from their purses, leave them in beds until riddled with sores and feed them blended microwave meals.

    Easy money

    project
    Free Member

    http://www.hse.gov.uk/press/2006/e06093.htm

    Yes i do have real insight of working and visiting a few so called care homes, my father, aunty, partners mother and a few family members have been in care/nursing homes and one thing is for sure they just want your money.

    Money that the residents pay is carefully ferreted away as bonuses and dividends for the management and the shareholders, one day possibly sooner rather than latter your parents may be in a so called care home, where all the management give a shit about is the cash flow,and paying the staff as little as possible, telling them to work 12 hour shifts, to work days off, to work in the kitchen without the relevant training,some of the staff try to do their best some dont care less and would be better employed in a burger bar.

    The tories have just got in, so labour where responsible, for the privatisation of care homes,or should that be the local councils who owned the homes.

    julianwilson
    Free Member

    Bupa may be a charity but they have to compete with mostly private homes, whose owners are in it to make money, looking after your nan is a secondary concern.

    The current move away from primary care trusts is leaving the door wide open to this happening to your health visitors, in-and-outpatient mental health services, non-acute medical rehabilitation and loads more. 🙁

    project
    Free Member

    Quirrel – Member
    How hard can it be to run a nursing home?

    Let the old people sit in their wee, nick the money from their purses, leave them in beds until riddled with sores and feed them blended microwave meals.

    Easy money

    Posted 13 minutes ago # Report-Post

    SO VERY TRUE, been there wrote the complaint letters,had lots of meetings, and still the muppets say we will investigate, but sod all gets done, until somebody else is seriously injured.

    julianwilson
    Free Member

    The tories have just got in, so labour where responsible, for the privatisation of care homes,or should that be the local councils who owned the homes.

    Its been happening since the mid-to-late eighties down here, despite local authority ping-ponging between labour and tory. Some were local authority and some NHS (so funded via strategic health authority via central government, not local authority.)

    In fact the first one I remember closing was called ‘Tory Brook’. Oh the irony.

    [edit] oh and in the 80’s the Care in the Community Act (guess who!) made a huuuuuuge market for the residential care of people with mental health and learning difficulties, largely catered for by profit-making private homes. Funnily enough it didn’t save much if any money, but a significant proprtion of funding for care of these people was paid into private enterprise rather than the salaries of hospital workers. Does this sound familiar to anyone?

    TandemJeremy
    Free Member

    Project – the privatisation was under thatcher and you clearly have no idea about the money involved – whereas I have run nursing homes and I do. I have worked in care of the elderly for 30 years.

    People without any funds of their own get support from the LA of under £500 a week. You cannot provide decent care for this. Homes like the bupa ones cross subsidise – care is around £750 a week ish – so the private residents paying £1000 a week actually subsidise the LA funded ones. Bupa care homes do not make a profit. They are in the middle aof the market. They are a charity

    At teh bottom end of the market homes only having LA funded at £500 a week make virtually no profit despite savage cost controls that impact on care standards. There is actually little discretionary spending so both outgoings and income is fairly well fixed – again I have worked in this sector and I know the numbers.

    At the top of the market are players such as Barchester who take no LA funded patients as they cannot afford it. there is a small profit in this sector and care standards are good if not excellent.

    Teh simple factor is that people do not want to spend the money to get good care. I’ll do some sample figures and post them for you.

    project
    Free Member

    and you clearly have no idea about the money involved – whereas I have run nursing homes and I do. I have worked in care of the elderly for 30 years.

    Sadly being paid to run a nursing home has absolutely no idea what the residents needs are, and what they give up to pay over the top fees.

    Barchester did infact take local authority residents,

    Scamper
    Free Member

    My Health and Safety Consultancy works a very broad cross section of the Care Home sector and someone somewhere is making money, as we are increasingly busy.

    Edric64
    Free Member

    ALL the nursing homes I have been in have stunk of piss ,served crap cheap food and employed thick grunts as care assistants.I would never put one of my family in one.

    Torminalis
    Free Member

    My parents owned a nursing home when I was a kid and we grew up surrounded by old beans. They eventually converted it to flats because they couldn’t compete with the large big business people storage unit that was built nearby. When my parents started out in about ’89 half of their referrals would come through social services and half through private enquiries.

    They charged £310 per week for genuine care and only had 11 residents. By the time they flogged it there were no referrals from Social Services at all because they were all going to the huge purpose built home a few miles away.

    It is a crying shame that there are no real political options that aren’t completely allied to big business interests in this country.

    damo2576
    Free Member

    How hard can it be to run a nursing home?

    Let the old people sit in their wee, nick the money from their purses, leave them in beds until riddled with sores and feed them blended microwave meals.

    Easy money

    That’s how so many people made so much money running nursing homes

    trailmonkey
    Full Member

    Project – the privatisation was under thatcher

    So what did NuLab do to reverse it ? Pretty pointless playing party politics on this one.

    In fact, if anything it looks worse on Labour than it does on the Tories. I’d at least expect the Tories to put economic liberalist ideals before healthcare, little excuse for a supposedly socialist party.

    noteeth
    Free Member

    no real political options that aren’t completely allied to big business interests in this country.

    As Julian Wilson says, the ConDem reforms are about to let those interests make hay with the NHS, as they’ve been itching to do for years.

    Cinven (Private Equity owners of Spire Healthcare, BUPA’s old hospital assets) must be creaming themselves.

    TandemJeremy
    Free Member

    60 bed home costs – back of fag packet calcs.

    Manager – £35 000
    Admin – £20 000
    4 charge nurses £120 000
    5 staff nurses £125 000
    30 care assistants £450 000
    10 domestics/ kitchen hands £150000
    maintenance man £20 000

    total wage bill of £920 000. these staffing levels cannot be reduced. add 10% for sickness and holidays – lets call it a million a year wage bill.

    Energy bills will be in the region of a couple of hundred thousand a year. Food pushing a hundred thousand a year, equipment costs at least £30 000 a year. Then there is insurance, maintenence contracts, payback on the loans for the building.

    For the sake of this lets say costs are 1.5 million

    Income. 60 residents at 500 a week is £1.56 million Of course you will not have 100 % occupancy

    Lots of profit there isn’t there?

    This building will cost ( excluding land) around a million, fitting it out another million at least.

    If you ant to be at teh top of the market you need to increase these costs by at leat 50%

    TandemJeremy
    Free Member

    Project – get a grip – I am a professional nurse. I know exactly what eh care needs are and what the numbers are.

    Scamper
    Free Member

    Obviously there are different ways to finance the above example TJ, and economies of scale for a Group of homes. I know a few Charities who seem to be doing well – not helped by being squeezed the LA’s on fees and rent.

    Regarding the OP above it does not exactly say what the prosecution was for. Appears to be a care issue as much as H&S.

    Woody
    Free Member

    and employed thick grunts as care assistants

    Not true – the vast majority of them IME are very caring, hard working individuals, who despite earning minimum wage do the very best they can for those in their care. I sincerely hope that when you end up in one Edric that you are cared for by the small minority!

    ernie_lynch
    Free Member

    Yet another death, and a huge fine……It makes me so angry.

    Tragic as it was, it was an accident…….no one did anything on purpose. What do you want, someone to go to prison ? Is a “huge fine” not enough ?

    The home was found guilty of breaches to Health and Safety. Funnily enough project, you have a record on here of ridiculing and contemptuously dismissing the “Health and Safety culture” in this country. Examples :

    project – Member

    Call on the services of the local health and safety manager, who will arrive wearing a hi viz jacket, clipboard, helmet, and he will do a risk assesment ,based on the data available to him rgarding temperature, height, risk of serious injury,equipment reqd to complete the task insurance claims etc.

    or you beat him to a pulp, and use his intesines as a makeshift rope.

    project – Member

    Sadly not trolling, it just appears that everything cant be spontaneus now, everything needs a meeting, funding, health and safety breifing , high viz jackets etc.

    project – Member

    Where you adhereing to the WORKING AT HEIGHTS REGUALTIONS,did you perform and have the relevant qualifications and training along with a fully filled in risk assesment, written in triplicate and signed by your senior manager to show you where competent at working at height.Where you wearing the relevcant safety equipment.
    Have you reported the matter to the Health and safety police.

    You can’t ridicule Health and Safety as an irrelevance and talk about the “Health and Safety police” and then express outrage at a company which has been found guilty of a relaxed attitude towards Health and Safety.

    I reckon you ought to make your mind up 💡

    palliative.stare
    Free Member

    I’m not sure it really matters what company runs a home, it tends to be the manager and the staff that dictate the care in the homes. I have seen shockingly poor care in BUPA and Methodist Homes care homes that rivals anything I have seen in privately run homes. Most homes charge more to people who can self fund their care, than they charge for those funded through social service’s and I’m sure this is to compensate for the very poor rates paid by LA’s. However, the BUPA home on my patch still charges one of the highest 3rd party top up’s in the area so families will still have to find the best part of £150 per week to top up what social services and the pension of the resident pay to get their loved one in. I know if it were my mum or dad needing care I wouldn’t be able to find the £600 per month I would need to get them into the BUPA home. Whilst I can admire the sentiment of someone who states they would never let their family go into a care home, having seen the skill, effort and compassion it can take to look after someone with true 24 hour care needs, I would like to know what their realistic propasal would be as an alternative to this.

    project
    Free Member

    TJ you may well have proffesional nurse on your name badge,i dont know, ive never met you,

    like the ones above who failed to follow procedures, and allowed a resident to die,

    Sadly there are a lot of unproffesional staff employed in homes,

    like the one who desscribed elderley residents as dirty old men, not worth caring for,

    the ones who refused to call an ambulance to a chap with a broken leg,

    the staff who refused to call the district nurses after a residents in dwelling catheter blocked,causing him considerable pain,

    the thieving scum who nicked 75 quid off my dad,along wirh his cash cards and wallet,

    the care staff who failed to notice a patient dead on the patio for over an hour,with a fractured skull who bled to death, who was found by a resident,

    the staff who left caustic soda in a drinking water jug in a emi home, and a resident drank it, suffering a terrible death,and getting the owners a large fine,

    the staff who left dinner plates on the floor outside a residents door, almost causing a visitor to fall, all because it wasnt their job to take them away,

    the member of staff who could hardly speak english when phoneing the Fire brigade to report a fire at a care home,

    the member of staff who emptied a catheter bag, and then handed out sandwiches without washing her hands or wearing gloves,

    the manager who was acting above his job and got told off by care standards for pretending to be more important than what he actually was,

    all the above without even doing a google search,

    TandemJeremy
    Free Member

    scamper – thats a very rough calculation and probably underestimates the number of Care assistants – 40 is probably nearer the mark so add another £150 000 to the wage bill. There should be an activities organiser as well

    The staffing levels are mandatory

    Economies of scale do come into it hence most new homes are 120 bed and a part of a small number of large companies. Its the only way to make any profit at all even at teh top of the market

    I thought the numbers approximate as they are would show some folk that it is not a path to easy riches. It was back in the 80s and early 90s but no more – the regulatory ratchet has increased costs and the LA funding has fallen in real terms

    I don’t believe this is the best system but it really annoys me with ignorant ranters saying that people make huge profits out of misery. It is simply not the case.

    I wanted to own and run my own nursing home which is why I worked in them to gain an insight. It soon became claer that actually it simply is not feasible to provide care of the standard I would want for under £500 a week per resdident

    The real scandal is the cross subsidy – in a home of mixed residents some LA funded and some private ( which is the norm) the private residents cross subsidise the LA funded ones. Teh nursing homes compete like mad for the private residents

    Costs are fixed by an large, LA funding is fixed – the only way of ensuring profitability is to increase private fees.

    TandemJeremy
    Free Member

    Project – thats teh point!

    Pay peanuts and you get monkeys! want decent care standards then you need to pay properly for it. Would you clean piss shit and vomit for minimum wage?

    So why did you not care for your loved ones Project?

    brakes
    Free Member

    cost of employment is more than just cost of salaries TJ
    add another 30-40% on top of your wage bill

    TandemJeremy
    Free Member

    Brakes – I added 10% to what the people get in their wage packet. Its only a back of the fag pack calculation sand I have almost certainly underestimated costs

    project
    Free Member

    Tj because i live in a flat, my father lived 40 miles away, he wanted and chose his care home,

    my aunty i had no choice in her wellbeing as she was looked after by her son, and he chose the home, from which she got severely infected bed sores and died of MRSA,a very painful death.

    Wonders how much it costs to keep a druggie in rehab, or a prisoner in jauil or even an Mp in in a job,also 35,00 for a manager is taking the piss, when the staff/workers are on 15,000.

    Pay management to much and you get greedy people, who dont care.

    palliative.stare
    Free Member

    So whye did you not care for your loved ones Project?

    Is this just a general question or a suggestion as to why poor care should be tolerated or just a cheap shot? Though I should ask before jumping to conclusions?

    edit – well, I guess it was taken as a general question..

    TandemJeremy
    Free Member

    You really have noi idea of how a care home runs.

    That £35 000 is the approximate cost to the employer – the salary will be under £30 000.

    ?A NHS staff nurse makes £25000 ish

    You want someone paid less than that to run a very difficult and stressful business with a turn over in millions?

    One of the major issues with Nursing homes is their inability to recruit staff at all let alone quality staff.

    Scamper
    Free Member

    ……..and also retain staff, including care home managers.

    TandemJeremy
    Free Member

    Indeed scamper

    Teh home I work part time for has just lost its manager again – the 3rd in 3 years. recruitment of staff is very difficult as the wages are so low – significantly lower than the NHS.

    Another local home was independent, went bankrupt and in 3 years had 4 different owners and 5 managers.

    2wheels1guy
    Free Member

    I’m pretty sure BUPA aren’t a charity.
    They are, according to they’re site, “Bupa is the UK’s leading provider of private health care insurance and health care services”
    My wife worked for/ran BUPA services.
    She says it is illegal to have the seatbelt on unless medically ordered & agreed by family or advocates.
    This was a tragic but avoidable accident.
    Lessons must be learned & procedures changed, training implemented.

    palliative.stare
    Free Member

    She says it is illegal to have the seatbelt on

    Would depend if the individual had the mental capacity to agree/ understand why the seatbelt was beings used, and appreciate the risks of using or not using it. If they didn’t have the capacity it could be viewed as a restraint or a deprivation of their liberty, so would need to be assessed on a balance of risk as to if this was in the persons best interest. It doesn’t mean an accident won’t happen, that being the nature of risk, but it does mean it should now be independantly assessed as the best course of action for the individual, taking into account the views of those involved in providing the care/ family etc. Not unusually the link to the story misses some pretty important details, but I think this probably just fuels the op.

    bazzer
    Free Member

    Costs are fixed by an large, LA funding is fixed – the only way of ensuring profitability is to increase private fees

    Not entirely true TJ LA’s are not legally allowed to put a cap on the costs they will pay. They will tell you this but if you are persistent quote the law at them enough times threaten them with legal action they will pay more, but not before they try and get the family to top it up.

    So its a case of those who are in a position to do the research get the best care and the vulnerable don’t.

    Bazzer

    TandemJeremy
    Free Member

    2wheels1guy – Member

    I’m pretty sure BUPA aren’t a charity

    Hmmmmmmmmm – i thought there were. Sorry

    Best info I can find. Its a not for profit organisation.

    Bupa is a private company limited by guarantee; it has no shareholders, and any profits (after tax) are reinvested in the business.[3]

    It does have a charitable foundation as well

    TandemJeremy
    Free Member

    Teh seatbelt issue is a complex one IMO bad practise to ever use them and I never will.

    Over a year ago a directive came round the Bupa homes telling us not to use them without good cause and risk assessments in place and how to avoid this type of accident.

    Scamper
    Free Member

    This case has just been on regional news. Seems HSE went to town on them for various breaches which may have come to light during the investigation. BUPA admitted a second count relating to other H&S breaches at an earlier hearing too.

    Woody
    Free Member

    Teh seatbelt issue is a complex one IMO bad practise to ever use them and I never will.

    What is the alternative TJ? Surely, when properly used they are an important safety device.

    TandemJeremy
    Free Member

    Its about balance of risk. Tehy don’t actually do a great deal to prevent falls, its not a common to fall out of a wheelchair anyway, they should not be left sitting in a wheelchair unless they are safe to do so without a belt. Infact people should not be left sitting a wheelchair unless they request it.

    They are used so someone can say – we took steps to prevent a fall out of the wheelchair when infact they should be doing so thru other methods that are safer.

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