Home care in Barnet: a report on the experiences of local home carers and home agencies

Healthwatch Barnet have sought the views of home care agency managers and home carers. The aim was to paint a more comprehensive picture of the experiences and challenges around delivering home care services locally. Overall, Healthwatch Barnet interviewed six home care agency managers and 46 home carers.

Through this research it emerged that: The number of people requiring home care locally is increasing, however there is a lack of home carers to meet this demand; recruiting and retaining home carers is challenging, which was often attributed to low pay; low rates of pay (wages and for travel) were a recurring issue for home carers; specifications set out by commissioners make it hard to maintain continuity of home carers and provide quality care as well as to deliver person-centred care; home care agencies and home carers both agreed that home care and hence home carers are undervalued; home carers received a wide range of training and supervision from their agencies; home care agencies carry out regular checks on home carers and ask service users for their views on the home care they receive; coordination between NHS and social care professionals is a challenge.

Healthwatch Barnet have developed 12 recommendations to address the key improvements identified in our research.

In summary, the findings echo those of Healthwatch Dorset which reported that: “Services need a high quality and stable workforce, rewarded and recognised appropriately for the essential and, at times, demanding work that they do.”