Supporting mission personnel and humanitarian workers worldwide
In an earlier post in January 2016, I reviewed the early stages of my mother settling into a care home which I called Luxury House. Five months later she died, shortly after a fall in her flat there. It was decided at the inquest that the care home was not responsible. As I described further last year, we were left with many questions about her care at Luxury House, and concerns about how ongoing issues might affect other residents. In February this year I visited the manager there to raise my concerns.
It was an illuminating meeting. To my surprise, the manager largely agreed with me. Luxury House is a large four-storey care home, whose general manager delegates management to different departments (housekeeping, activities, catering, maintenance, client relations, care) and floors. The problems we saw were mostly down to the middle manager of the floor Mum was living on. Lets call her Vera. The general manager said she had been dealing with shortcomings in Vera's management while Mum was at Luxury House. As it was more of a competence than a disciplinary issue (I agree) it took a lot of time to go through the appropriate procedures. But I was told that Vera had since left Luxury House, and systems had been changed to address many of the problems we saw. It seems that Mum was correct to decide that Vera was not a good manager.
It seems there was little that could have been done to stop her suffering the consequences, except that the general manager might have been able to act more swiftly if we'd passed on to her earlier the concerns that I passed on to CQC. But while Mum was at Luxury House, Vera's response to criticism encouraged us to believe that going to the top would backfire. We were asked not to keep going behind Vera's back, told to deal with her directly instead of other departments' managers, and discouraged from taking up the general manager's time. It was hard to be certain that our concerns amounted to a complaint, rather than something that would settle with time. Complaints to others tended to get back to Vera rebound on Mum and us.
It was well worth meeting with the general manager in February, and helped me to put to rest some of my feelings about Mum's last months. I am reassured that she had shared our concerns and had been acting on them. I hope she was being truthful and effective. I think the moral of this story is make sure you meet the general manager before sending a relative to a care home, and don't be afraid to take up concerns with higher management when they are not addressed satisfactorily by the managers you take them up with.
As I hope Luxury House's problems are mostly in the past, I think I can identify it now. You can read my review of it here.
Please use our contact form to comment.
Last updated
