Report on the domiciliary care lay monitoring pilot project
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As the independent champion for health and social care in the county, Healthwatch Northamptonshire (HWN) have been working with Northamptonshire County Council to find out what people who use domiciliary care and their families about the quality of this essential service. HWN is one of the initial Healthwatch organisations in the country to look at the quality of this provision from the point of view of people who use the service or their families (many of whom are also referred to as family or informal carers).
They conducted a pilot involving Healthwatch Northamptonshire volunteers talking individually, by telephone, to 76 service users or carers/family members who agreed to take part in the survey between March and June 2014.
They found high levels of satisfaction with the individual care workers, but there were serious concerns about the timing of care visits, continuity of staff and the lack of information about such changes. It was clear this uncertainty has an extremely negative impact on people’s lives. A significant number of respondents really emphasised the difference between their regular frontline paid care worker(s), for whom they had a high regard, and “the office” who they felt did not communicate enough.