‘Privatised care equals greed’

As part of Carers Week, UNITElive is publishing a series of stories featuring Unite members who care for their relatives or work in the care sector. In today’s final instalment, Emma explains why government cuts and privatisation are hurting the care profession.

Emma Wallworth proved she had the credentials for care work before she started in the industry.

Although Emma’s previous job as a veterinary nurse was quite different to caring for the elderly, the roles share a need for kindheartedness, patience and understanding.

“You can’t be a carer unless you care. You can be trained to be a carer and you can teach someone the procedures and policies, but you can’t teach someone to care. You’ve either got it or you haven’t,” explained Emma, who sits on Unite’s national activist and disabilities committees.

“I grew up with my dad being disabled, he was in a wheelchair or on two sticks, and my mum’s profoundly deaf. I’ve been around people with disabilities the majority of my life, so I think that’s where I get it from.”

Care work has never been well rewarded and the majority of the population could not cope with such a demanding and difficult occupation.

Yet if you can gauge the success of a society by the way it treats it’s most vulnerable, then the vast majority of Britain’s army of around 1.7m care workers are shining examples of what makes the UK great.

In recent years, however, the vocation has increasingly suffered from cuts to local government funding and a race to the bottom for service provision by large care sector companies only interested in turning a profit.

Emma, 29, who has been member of Unite (and heritage unions) since she was 16-years-old, has experienced the effects of government neglect of care services during the 11 years she has worked in the industry.

“It’s too much”

For eight years Emma worked at one high-dependency care home, housing people with dementia, Parkinson’s and severe mobility problems, but moved to another care job three months ago because understaffing at her old job had caused her back injuries, due to years of lifting patients in and out of bed.

“When I started there were plenty of staff. But now the private companies don’t care about the staff or the residents, they only care about the money. My previous job was very high pressure – the staff were underpaid and overworked. It was just too much,” said Emma.

“There were 38 residents and only four carers, one of whom only distributed medication. If a client passed away, there would someone else in their room the same day.

“It was like a conveyor belt. The Care Quality Commission rule is that residents should not be institutionalised, but they are because there’s not enough people to do the job. It’s not the carers’ fault.”

Emma’s Stockport care colleagues, like thousands of others across the country, are also struggling financially on zero-hour contracts, with many having to live in shared houses despite working full-time.

Although the living wage has provided a small boost to incomes, care employees are still underpaid, especially those working in home based care services.

“My friend has just had to give up her job, because she was wearing out her car for nothing,” Emma explained.

“She doesn’t get a penny in travel time and she doesn’t get enough time, say, in the morning, to get her clients up, washed and dressed and to give them their breakfast and tablets. Half an hour per client just isn’t enough.”

For Emma, private companies involved in the care industry “unfortunately equals greed.”

Integrated care

One way to get around the competitive tendering for privatised social care – and the under-resourced and mismanaged services that follow – is to create “National Care Service (NCS)” that is integrated with the NHS, an idea championed by Labour MP Andy Burnham.

Unite national officer for health Colenzo Jarret-Thorpe says in principle an NCS could work, but pointed out the crisis within Britain’s care industry lay at the door of the Tories’ austerity agenda.

“In the end the main issue is adequate funding,” he said. “We know the amount of older people within the population is increasing and we are going to need more social care in the future.

“If an NCS were created it would need to provide the best possible care and acceptable pay and working conditions for our members.

“What we don’t want to see is more of the race-to-the-bottom services that this government has encouraged.”