A long read
The Things That Are Already Decided
Five decisions that are fixed, what each one rules out, and why each was worth settling in writing rather than leaving to a busy week.
On this page
The Area Is One Town
Darlington. Not Darlington and surrounding areas, which is the phrase almost every care company in the country uses and which means, in practice, as far as somebody can be persuaded to drive. Drawing the line round one town rules work out, and it is meant to.
The distance between one house and the next is the thing that quietly decides how a day of visiting care actually goes. A round that is spread too wide spends its time on the road, and the time has to come out of somewhere. It comes out of the visits.
There Is a Name on It
Nicola Morrow is the registered manager. A person rather than a department, and the name that carries what happens in your house. If something goes wrong there is somebody to ring, and a written complaints procedure you are given at the start rather than have to go looking for.
This matters more than it sounds. A great deal of what goes wrong in home care goes wrong slowly, and it is nearly always noticed first by the family. What decides whether anything is done about it is whether there is an obvious person to tell.
The Shortest Visit
30 minutes is the floor, and it is the one number on this site that is fixed instead of assessed. Fifteen-minute calls exist because they let a company sell four visits in an hour. They are how a person turns into a task: there is time to do the thing, and no time at all to notice anything while doing it.
Half an hour is not generous, and it is not offered as generosity. It is the shortest visit in which the work and the person can both be attended to, which is why it is a floor and not an aim.
Trained Before They Visit
Nobody visits anybody before they are trained for what that visit involves. That is the order, and it stays the order on the weeks when it is inconvenient, which are the only weeks the rule is worth anything.
It is not an unusual thing to decide. It is only unusual to say out loud, because in a sector this short of people the pressure runs hard the other way, and “shadowing” is doing a great deal of work in a great many job descriptions.
No Price Before an Assessment
There is no price list on this site. What a week costs depends entirely on how many visits it takes and how long each one needs to be, and a rate quoted before anybody has seen the house is a number designed to win an enquiry rather than to describe your week. You get the cost of your own plan, in writing, before you agree to anything.
That cuts both ways, and it is only fair to say so: it means we cannot give you a figure on the telephone in ten seconds when another company will. What the conversation costs is nothing, and what comes out of it is a number you can take away and compare.
What to Do with This
These five are the things you can hold us to before anybody has been to your house. If you are ever told something on the telephone that contradicts one of them, this page is the one that is right, and it is worth saying so to whoever said it.