This video talks about what great care should look like—where carers are properly trained, fairly paid, and able to give the kind of personalised care that people actually need.

The speaker shares how tough it can be in the current system, from emotional stress to constant red tape. Carers often don’t get the support they deserve, and that makes it harder to provide good care. They highlight how care companies, families, and councils need to work together better to make things run more smoothly.

Personal stories bring the message home, especially the need for honest conversations with the people making the rules—because that’s how real change can happen.

Transcript:

 So picking up on that, in an ideal world how would this work for you?

Going into the whole kind of politics of it but in an ideal world, how it would work is that the local authority provides care services to the people that it is responsible for, and that those care services are as trained as the social workers are in terms of in terms of knowing how to deal with people that things are the carers themselves are paid well enough to be in jobs which they stay in. That they’re not put in impossible situations, which they can’t cope with, and therefore they leave after two months because it’s too much.

Because the emotional impact on all of the people involved, particularly at the kind of, at the bed end of care, that when this person needs you to turn them over and clean them, blah, blah, blah. All of that kind of stuff that if. That if you feel that you can’t do that work properly,because you’re being told that you have to get to the next call or because you’ve been told whatever, by your managers to hurry up and get out of there then it must be very soul destroying work, because then it’s just mucking out animals, I don’t know. Sorry. That’s a horrible thing to say, but surely the thing that young people go into care work for is the interaction.

My mom has got so much to say, she’s got so many brilliant stories to tell my mum was a professional dancer, She has her whole kind of relationship with her body is based on that experience and she’s got so many brilliant stories to tell about that there isn’t the time for people to hear her.

So going back, the whole care model would be genuinely person centered. It would be genuinely looking at who people are, not just what they need to have done to them, but who they are and who they have around them and partnership working.  So that a care company would be working in partnership with a family who is providing care, not in opposition to, not seeing that involvement as a threat, but seeing it as a bonus, what can we do to keep this person in a good state, and give them a good life. And how can we have conversations about that? I think one of the issues in terms of the structural management of the company I’m working with is that they, the thing they hate most is us having conversations with the carers. That’s what they see as a massive threat.

Because obviously between us, we have a much better idea of what should be done and how it should be done. Myself and the carers together than the management do. Oh, and so therefore, that’s a massive threat to them. Rather than seeing that as a bonus, whereas you would hope that a local authority, yes, I know there’s red tape galore.

I know there’s all kinds of things which get in the way of that person centered thing, but you would hope that ethicall that would be what they would want. That it’s like everyone should be signing up to, something which says, this is what we believe in. And actually believing it, not just, sticking it on a leaflet and putting it, in front of people.

It sounded like you were really alone in this, and I just wondered if you have connected with other people around this experience?

Yeah, there’s I think there are various kind of survival things in this, I think, on the one hand, I think that talking to other people. Who are going through similar things would be good. Just so I’m not totally alone. Like I have a partner who is incredibly, incredibly supportive and puts up with an enormous amount, just a ridiculously large amount.

And I have friends who are of similar age and who ha are dealing with elderly parents and I have those kind of connections. I think the thing is that I don’t. The reason why I came to speak to you is because I want to be able to speak directly to the people who can do something about it, because I could spend a lot of time sitting in a circle of people with tears coming down my face talking about how hard it is and sharing and listening about that.

But I don’t want to do it in a closed space. I want to do it where people could hear it. And and just, I feel that it really needs to be understood by the people who are making the decisions, and particularly those decisions which involve money, I think. And the decisions which say that a social worker has got a list of, a hundred people who are unmet needs and the only way that I’m ever gonna speak to that social worker is if I go, I must phone that social worker up. I must take the initiative. I must lead, I must initiate.

It’s a very long time since I ever had to apply for the, for social security for the dole, and that thing about you sign on, you don’t just sit there waiting for your gyro to come because it never will.

You just, you have to just keep, you just have to go. Chase, chase, the people who are overstretched over, over, overwhelmed themselves, and then you find your way into their world, so that’s so I do think community is important. I really do. And I think if I had the time, and also if there was something really local to me that I could go to, I would go.

I live in Diss this is on the boarder with Norfolk Suffolk. It’s the very south part of Norfolk. It’s very under provided in general with all kinds of things. So they, for example, if you wanted to go to some kind of support group, you’d go to Norwich probably, which is 20 miles away, which is, that’s a long way and it takes a long time. And, time is something that I don’t have. I’m a freelance worker. I can’t survive really financially. I can’t do the care that I’m doing and have my career survive. My career is like in trouble, I would say for because of because of what I’m doing.

But I can’t also say to my mom, goodbye, I’m going off to work in Belgium or whatever. I’m, it’s not, yeah, it is difficult, but it is also it’s just a weird thing, isn’t it? Because. A lot of the time what you feel like is, it’s nobody’s job to listen to this. Nobody has the job. If that was part, if that was a thing that was offered by social services, I would be going in there once a week talking to them and just going, offload, this is how I feel.

This is how difficult it is. This is what’s wrong with it. But nobody has that job. Everybody’s job is okay. Can you just stop talking now so that we can get on and do the thing that we are supposed we, we get paid to do.