Investigating people’s experiences of home care services was selected by the public as one of their top four priorities when we asked them to help us decide our workplan for 2020/21.
Investigating people’s experiences of home care services was selected by the public as one of their top four priorities when we asked them to help us decide our workplan for 2020/21. We wanted to find out more about:
- What was working well
- How isolated service users felt
- What could be better
- If service-users felt safe at home
As our engagement work coincided with the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic we were forced to stop all our face-to-face engagement. We had to rely on people completing the survey for us on-line or by post. We found that given the frailty of the service users and everything else that was going on in people’s lives the response was low. However, the people who took the time to respond provided some valuable information.
What came through strongly was that most people valued their care workers. Having friendly people coming into their homes to help them made a real difference.
We heard more than once that some of the frustrations were difficulties in speaking to someone in the office and changes being made to care without being told in advance.
Loneliness had been an issue for many. Some people told us care workers had been their only contact at times.
Although we feel we cannot give recommendations based on the size of the survey response, we have made some observations for commissioners and service providers to consider and these can be seen later in the report.
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