Care team management issues! — Scope | Disability forum
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Care team management issues!

Excalibur
Excalibur Community member Posts: 1 Listener

Hi all

I am brand-new to these forums and just wanted to see if anyone else has had issues like mine.
I have been living independently for the last 12 years but recently I have been feeling incredibly negatively towards independent living and managing my care team. I am a 42-year-old bloke but all my carers are around 60 and all women. I don’t want to go out socially with any of my carers as they would much rather sit on my sofa and watch TV but I don’t want to be seen with a 60-year-old as they look like my mother! when I first moved out of residential care everything was new and exciting! I Thought it would be far better to have complete control over my direct payments so I hired my own care team and have been managing them myself for the whole time. In some ways I have been lucky as I have managed to keep the same staff for 10+ years but the issue I have got as I have treated them like family they now expect everything on a plate. They have all said they are going to stay until they retire so I am stuck with an ageing care team who I cannot change for another 6 to 8 years!

I really hate confrontation so shy away from it whenever possible. This means I have been a bit of a pushover when it comes to the staff getting their own way. This has led to complacency within the team and when they don’t get their own way I’m the one that gets stressed about it!

Last year I got told by one of my staff my wages were low so I contacted social services to try and get a top up to my direct payments. My social services took six months to get back to me and they came to see me and yes your wages were below minimum wage but they are dragging their feet on giving me the increase.

With the latest legislation regarding paying a minimum hourly rate of £7.50 for a sleep in I worked out I would need another £8000 a year. Social services said I could backdated this figure to the beginning of April but At the moment I am still waiting to get this increase agreed by social services so I am using surplus cash I have not used.

My overall direct payments budget is a significant amount of money and I have had a 1.5% surplus at the end of the year. I have been asked to send back these funds to social services but I think the carer holding the letter in front of me so I could read it, read it as well as She said to another member of staff “it’s about bloody time he got us an increase but he has got a lot more in his account than he is supposed to have so why doesn’t he increased the wages more.” So first of all this is a minuscule amount of money to return back to social services based upon my overall budget and secondly is nothing private anymore?


Then I have got another staff wanting the enhanced hourly rate for a sleep in on top of what I already pay her for a bank holiday! I have been very generous with the bank holiday enhancement already so adding an extra £7.50 per hour on top of that would just be ridiculous!

I am also trying to get social services to backdate the wages from last year so that it meets the minimum wage requirements. I guess I won’t get any thanks for that either!

I know this post sounds negative I do get on well with my carers on a day-to-day level, I just hate managing them!

I am seriously giving going back into care a thought as I really hate the managing of my care team!
Any opinions would be appreciated!
Thanks

Comments

  • forgoodnesssake
    forgoodnesssake Community member Posts: 500 Pioneering
    This sounds  a very stressful situation.  Have you thought about getting someone else to manage the staff and/or payroll for you?  Not using an agency as such but some sort of third party manager?  Your local authority should have an "independent" organisation that can help you at least with payroll but there may be other organisations in your area.  You could ask Citizens advice or a local Disability organisation if you have one.  In terms of the minimum wage it is actually an offence to pay less so your local authority cannot give you DPs for less than that, and I would argue that they should give you a darn site more!  They should back date it to the point where what they are giving you became less than the minimum wage.  If they were paying an agency themselves it would be more like £15 per hour.  Good luck.

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