Could it be that you don't attend the good ones at all regularly because they're good enough to not need Ambulance assistance, taking care of the minor medical problems with the in-house staff and calling only for the major ones?

Oh absolutely. That and the care that they give limits the amount of time that the people there are sick.

That post's made me so sad... I hate it when people have to treat others who are unable to look after themselves like that.

I volunteer to take the stick o'pain and shove it up the appropriate orifices of these so called 'carers'.

Is there no central government department responsible for these places? Somewhere you can ring and get them to investigate?

Every sector in LAS has more than one of these awful places. Stories of useless, untrained staff - who rarely speak English - still trying to feed a person who has been deceased for some time. Food left at the bedside uneaten, because the patient cannot feed themselves, and the staff either won't or can't. Patients with infected bedsores who have not been moved even a few inches to give some relief from the pressure of lying in the same place for days on end. Patients who have nothing to do but look at a bare wall all day.

Excuse me - but I f**king hate them.

The stick o'pain is a good idea. I do wonder what pocesses some people to treat others like that. Whatever happened to respecting your elders?

society doesn't seem to have a "respect for your elders" part to it. Gone also are the days of respect towards the Police and other uniformed services like the Ambulance Service. I could go on but it would turn into a rant and take up most of the page.

Aren't these homes regulated? What happened to snap inspections?

All private homes are checked by CSCI (that's the Commission for the Stupid and the Criminally Insane to anyone that has encountered them before although they like to think it stands for Commission for Social Care Inspection) and they do unannounced inspections. The thing about the inspections is that it is perfectly ok for a carer to be forcefeeding a dead person as long as they have a 'dead person feeding policy', a risk assessment to cover the activity and bits of paper to show that said carer has been trained to feed a corpse. Now, it's all about the papertrail whereas it used to be about the care. That's why homes like these are still in existence and as long as CSCI continues to employ people who have never worked in the industry so don't know what to look for and who don't give a shit about anything but the paperwork they'll continue to exist.

I used to work in a home. Some 'carers' are ignorant to the needs of their clients. Basically they reckoned as long as they'd got them up, given them a couple of mouthfulls of breakfast and lunch, then put them back to bed they'd done their job.

Do you have a secret list of all the bad homes that you could give me so that if I or anyone I know needs to go to one we can avoid them?!

probably easier to ask for a list of the good ones, much shorter sadly.

It struck me, that when animals (eg donkeys/horses) are left with sores, and malnourisheds. The RPSCA go around and the public are up in arms, people are prosecuted.

Maybe we should send the RSPCA around to the homes, after all, we are animals.

These homes are giving the entire industry a bad name and making the work of the good homes, like ours, ten times harder. If you don't have time to take the stick 'o' pain round the whole country I'd be happy to volunteer to cover the Northwest!

Isn't there some means for the likes of hospital workers, police and ambulance men to make a complaint that will be looked into? Surely what's going on in Jersey shows as what happens when systems fail.