Home Care in Shropshire
Summary
There are over 80 registered domiciliary care providers in Shropshire providing care to around 3,500 people. However we recieve very little feedback regarding domicillary care. We wanted to give people receiving domiciliary or home care a chance to give their views.
We put together a questionnaire for people using home care services. We asked for feedback on our questionnaire from Shropshire Partners in Care who helped us refine our questions.
Healthwatch Shropshire met with 7 home care providers who deliver care services within Shropshire. These meetings took place between October and December 2019. We wanted to speak to the providers to see what was working well for them in the county and what challenges they were facing. We also wanted to ask providers to promote our questionnaire amongst the people they provide care to.
Our questionnaire ran from November 2019 until March 2020.
Key Findings
Themes raised by home care providers:
- Recruitment is increasingly difficult for the sector and consistency of care can be difficult to achieve. Providers told us that they try their best to keep staff consistent, particularly for those with Dementia, but as they have a high proportion of part time workers amongst their staff this is not always possible.
- The rurality of the county poses extra problems for providers in respect of travel time
- Hospital discharges can pose problems for providers due to a lack of communication, mixed messages or failed discharges
- For some, technology is making the administrative side of the business more efficient and improving communication
Key findings from the questionnaire:
- Service users who responded to our survey were very happy with their experiences in the main
- Continuity of care was found to be an issue with 24% of respondents telling us they feel that they see too many different carers.
- More people who were funding their own care felt involved in decisions about their care (100%) than people who were receiving council or health funded care (88%).
- Self-funders were also more likely to feel the carers visited them at the times they wanted (86%) compared with people receiving council or health funded care (79%).
Full Report
If you need this report in a different format, please contact us:
enquiries@healthwatchshropshire.co.uk
01743 237884
