Witzend
M0nica
Macgran43
My monthly bills to stay in my spacious home add up to approximately £1500 This includes paying a cleaner and gardener . I would think it fair that I should pay this amount to a Care Home. Nursing care is free. A local Nursing Home is charging £6000 per month. For this I would have a small bedroom with en-suite. Someone must be making a large profit.
Anything but. Running a Care home is very expensive. To begin with there is the cost of staff.
When visiting a relative in a care home, there was a practice fire alarm just as we arrived and we had to wait in the entrance area where staff gathered. DH and I reckoned that there was one member of staff there for every resident. There were carers, cleaners, laundry staff, catering staff, maintenance staff, gardeners, as well as admin and a few nurses.
Add on to your £1,500 the cost of employing someone full time to live with you to cook and do your laundry, maintin your home, do the shopping. Add in insurance costs, the costs of all the specialised equipment they have to have and have serviced regularly, then there is regulation, all the expense in checking staff, training them, and so so on.
You will find by the time you have added up all those costs, the 'profit' in that £6,000 is not that great. You need to remember that while nursing care may be free, most people in care homes, as distinct from nursing homes, which will be much more expensive, do not need nursing care, just care, so do not qualify for free nursing.If you work out the rate per day of care home fees, and compare it to the cost of bed and breakfast in a reasonable hotel locally, it may not seem so excessive.
A care home provides all meals and drinks, often a lot of help with washing, dressing and ‘toileting’ as they like to call it, all laundry (often a lot, especially if there’s dementia) and usually very high levels of heating during the colder months.
Plus, usually, someone on hand 24/7 to help, reassure anyone confused or agitated, etc.
I know care homes have a lot of outgoings to pay for but many cut these to the bone.
My Mum spent several months so in such a home where they had the cheapest, thin white bread, slimy cheap ham, that dreadful cheap squash that is almost colourless. All budget range stuff. Heating was never sufficient and they got one bath or shower a week and the water was barely warm.
After visiting 14 homes I found a wonderful one with all homecooked food and proper bread and butter.
