Helping Hands blog

A dignity code is being called for to protect elderly from abuse, undignified care and discrimination based on age as reported in the Daily Telegraph today. This call has support from the minister for care services Paul Burstow and his Labour shadow, Liz Kendall, as well as charities, trades union organisations and academics. It is expected that all care provider organisations will have to sign up to this code and eventually it will become integral to the contracts of employment for staff in all care settings.

As one of the country’s oldest and most respected live-in care providers, Helping Hands is in the fortunate position of having some of the country’s best professional carers working for us. But of course most carers in the UK are not professionals. There are 6 million people in the UK looking after someone who’s frail, disabled or unable to cope. These carers often work in silence, never complaining, never asking anybody for help.

The home care sector’s leading representative body, the United Kingdom Home Care Association (UKHCA) has welcomed the House of Commons Health Committee’s report into social care. The UKHCA believes it is an important wide-ranging contribution to the debate about how we care for older people and other vulnerable groups.

Dr Rekha Elaswarapu is an Advisor to Helping Hands; she is a dignity champion and an experienced professional who is passionate about quality improvement and better outcomes for people using services in health and social care.

The current biopic about the life of Margaret Thatcher - The Iron Lady - has received mixed reviews from movie critics and politicians alike; even Prime Minister David Cameron is said to have been uneasy over the film’s timing. This is not an opinion shared by Paul Burstow, Minister of State for Care Services who describes the film as an opportunity to bring dementia “out of the shadows”.

There is a good chance that you have started to plan for your funeral; half of British adults have. Whether it is the location, the flowers, the music, the invitation list, it seems that the British have no problem whatsoever thinking about how their passing will be marked.

There are hundreds of thousands of carers in the UK; quietly caring for family members every day. Many never take a break, they feel guilty at leaving their loved on to go on holiday, they hate the idea of having to put their loved ones through the upheaval of going into a home for two weeks, they fear the anxiety that a new routine in unfamiliar surroundings will cause.

Dignity is at the core of everything Helping Hands does. We recently asked some of our dedicated Carers exactly what “dignity” means to them:

Customer review websites are common place on the internet. Many of us will not book a holiday without first checking a resort’s ranking on Tripadvisor, so the recent announcement that the government is planning to introduce a “Tripadvisor style” website which will rate the UK’s care providers is, on the face of it, very exciting news.

Whether it is a mother caring for her baby or an adult caring for an elderly parent, the simple act of care is a wonderful human instinct; it’s strange then that those who care are not more valued by our society.