CQC Failed to Protect Vulnerable

By the Care Quality Commission’s own admissions during 2015, 53 care homes were closed by the CQC and 41% of community-based adult social care services, hospice services and residential social care services inspected since last October were inadequate or required improvement.

Even David Prior, chairman of CQC has admitted they failed elderly because they were too scared care home owners would sue them!

The CQC a watchdog set up to protect the elderly and vulnerable were failed because it feared legal threats from owners of care homes.

These same care homes and providers who are threatening to put an already cash strapped NHS under Pressure if the living wages is applied to care staff, those front line actually providing the care to our elderly and vulnerable.

Then today it was reported that Prosecutions are 'rare' for abuse by home carers.  More than 23,000 allegations of abuse have been made against carers working in people’s homes across the UK, in my opinion that’s 23,000 allegations too many.

The United Kingdom Homecare Association, which represents 2,000 care companies, described the findings as "horrifying" and blamed cuts to local government budgets.

The BBC asked every council in England, Scotland and Wales with responsibility for social care for the numbers of allegations of abuse and neglect made against home carers contracted by local authorities.

In Northern Ireland, the BBC sent Freedom of Information requests to health and social care trusts.

This revealed that between 2013-14 and 2015-16 there had been at least 23,428 safeguarding alerts across the UK, but only half the councils provided data.

Most of the alerts related to care provided in England.

Why do Care Providers have such a hold over the CQC and the Government?  We reported on this phenomenon in our article Minimum Wage for Care Workers, where Service Providers biggest concern about the introduction of the Living Wage was profit, and they were “lording” over the Government their threaten our already underfunded NHS.

In cases of Abuse and Neglect of our elderly and vulnerable prosecutions were rare, with just 700 of the 23,428 alerts resulting in police involvement and only 15 prosecutions. Any Abuse should be criminal and the perpetrators treated as such but it so rarely gets prosecuted, why? The vast majority of alerts were raised about elderly people, with more than 9,700 involving people aged over, and 164 about people who were aged over 100.

“It gets social worked”, but it doesn't get prosecuted.

“If” there's an investigation, rarely will the police be involved.

“If” the police are involved, they don't actually want to upset that old person, so they won't prosecute.

"So, you might get a police caution if you're lucky, or there might be no prosecution at all."

Councils were asked by File on 4 for the reasons behind the alleged abuse.

They included:

·         more than 12,300 alerts concerning neglect

·         2,400 reports of psychological abuse

·         more than 3,400 alleged incidents of physical abuse

·         more than 400 claims of sexual abuse

It is not possible to find out whether all these reports were valid and fully investigated.

But the local government ombudsman, Michael King, said there was a growing problem over standards of home care.

Ombudsman complaints about homecare rose by 25% last year to 372, and 65% of them were upheld.

A Department of Health official said: "This government has introduced tougher inspections of care services, given councils access to up to £7.6bn of dedicated funding for social care and will continue to challenge local authorities that do not fulfil their duties under the Care Act."