Understanding Care Services: Reablement

What Is Reablement?

Reablement is a service offered to you to help you regain or maintain your independence and thus continue living safely in your home. Typically, it is offered to you after you have spent a period of time in hospital or where you are recovering from injury or illness.

The approach underpinning reablement is aimed at helping you to live your life independently. Reablement workers are not charged with the responsibility of doing things for you; they are responsible for helping you become confident and competent in doing things for yourself. Therefore, reablement workers should not be coming into your home to cook a meal for you; they should come in to help you learn or relearn the skills to do this for yourself.

What Is the Purpose of Reablement?

If things go well everyone benefits from reablement. You gain the skills and confidence to continue living in your home independently. You may still need home care from a home care provider; however, there is evidence to suggest that this is at a much lower level than it might otherwise have been.

Who Qualifies for Reablement?

This varies from area to area. The aim is to provide reablement services to people who will benefit from it. It is Local Authorities who oversee reablement and, as with all types of health and social care, there are limited resources available to provide the service. Some hard decisions will have to be made, therefore.

If you live in Kent, reablement is called enablement. You can find out more about what is available from Kent Social Services here and here.

How Do You Get Reablement?

The first step is to get yourself referred to the Local Authority. In Kent you can make a referral yourself; for more information go to this page. You will then need to have an assessment. The purpose of the assessment is to determine what help you need to be able to continue living your life in your home as safely and independently as possible for as long as possible.

What Is the Cost of Reablement?

Reablement is free for a period of up to six weeks. This is the case even if you normally have to pay wholly or partly for care that you are receiving. In certain circumstances, reablement may continue beyond the period of six weeks.

What Does Reablement Involve?

Everyone who has reablement is different; therefore, the detail of the service you receive will be tailored to your needs. There are, however, some common features of enablement.

The aim is always to help you regain your confidence by learning or relearning important skills to help you live independently for as long as possible. There should be a reablement plan in place that both you and your reablement workers are working to. This plan will include goals for you to aim for. These goals could include such things as walking up and down stairs and/or preparing a meal.

Who Provides Reablement Services?

It is local authorities that run the service. They may sometimes be run in conjunction with NHS Continuing Care. Local Authorities may have their own reablement workers. Alternatively, Local Authorities may use private suppliers to provide the services. It is probably that other health professionals, like occupational therapists and physiotherapists, may be involved with your reablement service. You are entitled to sort out your own enablement provider.

Whilst you are receiving reablement support, social services should be working with you to determine the care you will need when reablement finishes. Such other people as your carers and family should be involved in this planning also.

If you would like any further advice about reablement or any aspects of domiciliary care, please contact me on the telephone number or at the email address below.

Garry Costain is the Managing Director of Caremark Thanet, a domiciliary care provider with offices in Margate, Kent. Caremark Thanet provides home care services throughout the Isle of Thanet. Garry can be contacted on 01843 235910 or email garry.costain@caremark.co.uk. You can also visit Caremark Thanet's website at www.caremark.co.uk/thanet.

Kent County Council Parts Company With One of Its Three Chosen Home Care Providers for Thanet

If you live in Thanet and receive domiciliary care through social services you could hardly fail to be aware of the controversial change that came into effect last year, 2014.  

Home care in Thanet, like home care throughout Kent, is provided by a number of private companies. Until last year, many of these companies would have provided home care under contract with Kent County Council (KCC). Prior to June 2, 2014, KCC worked with over 120 providers throughout Kent. From 2 June 2014, that number fell to 23. In Thanet, the number fell to just 3 home care providers. You can see the providers for each area in Kent here.

There can be little doubt that local authorities throughout the country were looking at the Kent experiment. If it was successful and saved money, you can bet that something similar would be adopted all over the place. It would appear, though, that things have not gone quite as well as might have been hoped.

When the experiment in Kent was being implemented there were many voices warning that this might not be an especially good move. One particularly prescient voice was Bridget Warr’s from the UKHCA. She is on record as saying that her concern was  “… that what we’ll end up with is vulnerable people not getting the support they need at the time they need it.”

Today, 28 May 2015, The Thanet Gazette has reported that KCC has decided to cease working with one of its three chosen providers in Thanet when the current contract comes to an end on 1 June 2015.  Amongst other things, it is said that a significant amount of negative feedback has been received about this particular provider. You can read the Thanet Gazette report here.

Many social services customers are under the impression that they have no choice but to have their care delivered to them by the company that KCC chooses for them. This is not the case. Anyone who receives social services funding is entitled to receive a direct payment. I have written about this extensively in previous articles that you can find here, here and here. What direct payments mean is that you are given a sum of money that allows you to buy your home care from a provider of your choice. And there is plenty of choice in Thanet.

Not everyone will want the responsibility of taking control of buying their home care: but many will. Under normal circumstances, if you receive financial support from KCC for your home care you have a right to have direct payments. All you have to do is ask. Direct payments put you in control. You choose your home care provider. If that provider does not deliver a quality service you go somewhere else. In most cases, that has to be a very good thing indeed.

If you want advice about direct payments or any aspects of domiciliary care, do not hesitate to contact me.

Garry Costain is the Managing Director of Caremark Thanet, a domiciliary care provider with offices in Margate, Kent. Caremark Thanet provides home care services throughout the Isle of Thanet. Garry can be contacted on 01843 235910 or email garry.costain@caremark.co.uk. You can also visit Caremark Thanet's website at www.caremark.co.uk/thanet.

How You Can Change Home Care Providers

Caremark Thanet: Excellence in domiciliary care

If you receive home care through Social Services, you probably had little involvement with how your home care provider was chosen. Everything would have been done for you, and there’s not too much wrong with that so long as you are happy with the service that you are being provided with.  You may, however, have decided that it is time to change your current home care provider, and you can do this very easily by getting direct payments from Social Services. 

Under normal circumstances, you have a right to receive direct payments. All you have to do is ask; indeed, you should be informed that you have the right to receive direct payments when you have a Social Services assessment. For more information; go to this page. 

If you are receiving care through Social Services, you will have been awarded a personal budget. (For more information on personal budgets, go to this article.) When you have a direct payment, your personal budget is paid to you. This allows you to choose the home care provider that you want to provide your care. If you do not want to take on the responsibility of the direct payments, you can allow someone else (a relative or friend) to do this for you. 

Direct payments work in a very straightforward way. Kent County Council pay an amount of money into your bank account or onto a Kent Card. The Kent Card is a Visa debit card and you can find out more details here. You then use this money to buy your care from a provider of your choice.

Direct payments put you in control. If you should like further advice about direct payments, or, indeed, any aspect of domiciliary care, please do not hesitate to contact me. My contact details appear below.

Garry Costain is the Managing Director of Caremark Thanet, a domiciliary care provider with offices in Margate, Kent. Caremark Thanet provides home care services throughout the Isle of Thanet. Garry can be contacted on 01843 235910 or email garry.costain@caremark.co.uk. You can also visit Caremark Thanet's website at www.caremark.co.uk/thanet.

Do You Want to Work in Domiciliary Care?

Caremark Thanet: Providers of Outstanding Domiciliary Care to the Residents of Thanet

We are looking recruit a small number of care and support workers to supplement our existing team. We are looking for people to cover: Margate, Ramsgate, Broadstairs, Westgate, Birchington and Sandwich.

If you would like to find out more about the opportunities that are available with us please telephone me on 01843 235910. However, before you do that, please read the following article:

http://thanetcare.blogspot.co.uk/2015/03/what-do-we-look-for-in-potential.html

This article tells you a great deal about the type of company we are and what we look for in care and support workers.

You can also visit our website: www.caremark.co.uk

and Facebook page: facebook.com/caremarkthanet

If you feel that we are the type of company that you would like to work for: telephone me now.

What Do We Look for in Potential Domiciliary Care Workers?

A Very Brief Overview of Domiciliary Care

Domiciliary care, or home care as it is often called, is care provided in customers’ homes. In England alone there are some 7000 domiciliary care providers and around 350 000 people delivering care to the customers of those providers.

                                       

I’m the managing director of a domiciliary care company, Caremark Thanet. We are a company that is growing steadily. For that reason we are always looking to recruit outstanding carers. Not everyone who wants to work for us is suitable. And, let’s be perfectly candid here: we are not suitable for everyone.

A question that we are sometimes asked is what we look for when we recruit care and support workers. Customers often ask about the experience that our carers have. Some are very experienced, indeed. However, there are things other than experience that we look for.

This post is written for a general readership; however, if you are reading this and you’d like to work in domiciliary care; we’d like to hear from you. Keep reading and you’ll find out a little about us so that you can decide whether we are the type of company you’d like to work for.

About Us

We are a domiciliary care provider serving the Isle of Thanet. We have been providing home care services to the residents of Thanet since 2012. In that short time we have developed a reputation for the outstanding quality of the services we provide.

There are two of us (my wife and I) at the head of the company: Jayne Costain is the Director of Care and Registered Care Manager. I’m Garry Costain, the Managing Director. Jayne has gained a wealth of experience in health care from working as a nurse for over fifteen years. My background lies in education and management.

We are a business. We are part of the service sector. We provide a very important service to some of the most vulnerable people in our society. We view our customers in the same way as any outstanding business should, which means that our philosophy is very simple. We aim to provide outstanding domiciliary care to each of our customers. On that we will never compromise. To achieve our aim we believe that our starting point is to recognize that:

Our customers are entitled to expect us to fit our services to their needs; we are never entitled to expect our customers to fit their needs to our services.

It is our duty to do all we can to help our customers remain independent and living in their homes for as long as they wish.

Upholding the dignity, supporting the independence and promoting the safety of each of our customers are paramount.

Without our customers our services would not be required.

We are only as good as the services provided to our customers by our care and support workers. For that reason, we have a right to be very selective in the people we choose to provide those services.

The people who provide our services to our customers are the most important people in our company.

In a sentence, what this means is that everything we do, we do for the benefit our customers.

What Do We Look for in Potential Carers?

What qualities, then, do we look for? There are two qualities in particular that we look for. There are, of course, many other skills and qualities that are needed. No-one will possess all of these and it is not necessary to possess them all.  However, we believe that the two qualities below are ones without which it is impossible to do the job. These qualities are small in number but infinitely large in importance.

Firstly, a carer has to be able to care. That, you may think, is stating the obvious. It is not. You only have to look at the number of horrendous cases of abuse by care workers to realise that the ability to care is not a quality that all people working in care possess.

People now talk about the mum test. This is a test that we have always applied when selecting care and support workers. We have always asked ourselves whether we would be happy for a potential carer to look after a member of our family. If we have any doubts then that person is not for us.

Secondly, a carer must be able to embrace our idea of customer service. The six points above give you quite a strong flavour of what customer service means to us. However, let me add some extra seasoning to our customer service dish so that you are left in no uncertainty about how important this is for us.

We are dependent upon our customers. Our customers can go elsewhere; there are plenty of other home care providers in Thanet. If we are providing an outstanding service for our customers; our customers will want to stay with us. As I never tire of saying, the quality of the service we provide is only as good as the carers who provide the service.

Providing a service to our customers is not an inconvenience for us. It is the reason we are here. If customers did not want our services we would not be needed. We take money from our customers to provide them with a service. That is not an inconvenience: that is a privilege.

Our customers’ needs change over time. When our customers contact us to make changes – even at short notice – even several times in a few days – we will do everything we can to accommodate them as quickly as we can. They are favouring us with their custom: we are not doing them a favour by responding to their requests. Any decisions we make will be guided by the principle that we will do all that we can to inconvenience our customers least. We may have to inconvenience ourselves, but that is why we are here.

Our reason for being in business is to meet the needs of our customers. We will always adopt the approach that it our job to look for ways to ensure that our customers’ needs are met. It is not our job to look for ways that will prevent us from fulfilling our customer’s needs.

In Conclusion

We have very high standards: we are proud of that. We have never compromised and will never compromise on the quality of the care that we provide: we are also proud of that. And we are equally proud of the high calibre carers that deliver our outstanding care. I have written before about carers being more than “just care workers”. In that article I spoke about how important our care workers are and said:

“That’s not to say that managers are not important: of course they are. That’s not to say that administrators are not important: of course they are. It is saying that without first class care staff who are manifestly MORE than just care workers, high class domiciliary care cannot be delivered. Businesses often pay lip service to the idea that their staff are their most valuable assets: domiciliary care companies do this at their peril.”

Not everyone who wants to work for us is suitable: but those who do work for us are manifestly more than care workers. They are our company’s most important people.

 Garry Costain is the Managing Director of Caremark Thanet, a domiciliary care provider with offices in Margate, Kent. Caremark Thanet provides home care services throughout the Isle of Thanet. Garry can be contacted on 01843 235910 or email garry.costain@caremark.co.uk. You can also visit Caremark Thanet's website at www.caremark.co.uk/thanet.

Will You Support John’s Campaign?

What Is John’s Campaign?

I want to tell you about a campaign; it’s a very special campaign; you may have heard of it; you may not; it’s called John’s Campaign. If you’ve heard of it you’ll know how important it is; if you haven’t heard of it, let me tell you why it’s important; it’s important because it deals with an issue that will touch the lives of many of us at some point: John’s Campaign is the campaign for the right to stay with people with dementia in hospital.

The campaign was named after Dr John Gerrard who died five weeks after entering hospital in November 2014. John was aged 86 when he died. He had been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease when he was in his mid-70s. He went into hospital to have treatment for leg ulcers. His family described his decline as catastrophic.

Going into hospital is unnerving and unsettling for most of us. For someone with dementia who is already confused, insecure and frightened the experience is something that we can only try to imagine. How can any society with any claims to being a compassionate one deny people with dementia the comfort of having a familiar figure with them when they are in hospital? One of the most important elements of support that people with dementia can be given is the reassurance that comes from having trusted people with them.

June Andrews, Professor of dementia studies at the University of Stirling puts things starkly: “…for many [people with dementia], getting admitted [to hospital] is the top of a slippery slope.” To find out what things might be encountered once on the slippery slope I recommend Andrews’ article to you. Further information is provided as follows by the Alzheimer’s Society:

• Over a quarter of hospital beds in the UK are currently occupied by people with dementia
• The average stay of a person with dementia is three weeks but it can be much longer if rehabilitation is a problem or there is nowhere suitable to go
• One third of people with dementia who go into hospital for an unrelated condition NEVER return to their own homes
• 47% of people with dementia who go into hospital are physically less well when they leave than when they went in
• 54% of people with dementia who go into hospital are mentally less well when they leave than when they went in

As things stand, there is no general right for carers, family or friends to stay with people with dementia when they are in hospital. Practice varies from hospital to hospital and from ward to ward. By supporting John’s Campaign you will be supporting the right to stay with people with dementia in hospital.

What Can You Do?

1.      Go to the website of John’s Campaign, in particular this page, which explains different things you can do.

2.      Download, read and disseminate widely the John’s Campaign Statement.

3.      This is an election year. You can question candidates about how they and their parties stand on the issue.

4.      Write to your local NHS trust and ask what its policy is.

5.      Go to the John’s Campaign Facebook page, like it and encourage all your friends to do the same.

It strikes us as almost unbelievable today that there was once a time - and it was a time in the not too distant past - that parents were not allowed to stay with their sick children in hospital. The generation who won the right for parents to stay with their children when they are in hospital is the generation who will benefit when John’s campaign succeeds.

If you have read this far, please support John’s Campaign.

Garry Costain is the Managing Director of Caremark Thanet, a domiciliary care provider with offices in Margate, Kent. Caremark Thanet provides home care services throughout the Isle of Thanet. Garry can be contacted on 01843 235910 or email garry.costain@caremark.co.uk. You can also visit Caremark Thanet's website at www.caremark.co.uk/thanet.

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