How to hire a home carer

Many families are facing a future in which a parent will need continuing care. As online recruitment specialists in home-based care, we’re in contact with many families who are trying to find a carer for a parent whose needs are becoming more complex. As a result, those families are seeking an hourly, or even full-time live-in carer.

What we’ve discovered is that few of these families recognise the complexity of identifying the right carer. They don’t really understand the potential difficulties ahead, from hiring through to managing a carer. For example, very few of them have a plan in place for what needs to happen if their chosen carer decides to leave.

Why organise your own care for elderly parents or adults with special needs?

But we don’t want to sound negative. There are good reasons to co-ordinate your own care arrangements, not least that the Government clearly wants more families to do this and has created the direct payments scheme so that they can.

In addition, whilst there are many considerations, such as the cost typically being somewhat higher, we’ve seen so many successful home care arrangements with the family as the employer that we’re confident about recommending this course of action. It can simplify matters when there is a single point of contact- the family – to which the carer is accountable. In addition,when the family also manages the funds and makes the decisions, the quality of life for the cared for individual can be much higher. Above all, they get to stay in their own home, which supports independence and allows continued enjoyment of many aspects of life.

Our guide to hiring and managing a home carer sets out to ensure families have all the information they need to make great decisions about hiring a home carer.

Five key things to consider when hiring a carer

1. When you organise home care, you actually become an employer. This means you will need to create an employment contract and pay salary, tax and NI, sick pay and holiday pay, as well as taking out public liability insurance.
2. People organising care themselves also have the responsibility for checking eligibility to work in the UK and conducting a Disclosure and Disbarring Service check (DBS), which replaces the Criminal Records Bureau (CRB) check and ensures any potential carer is not disbarred from care work and has no unspent criminal convictions.
3. Employers of carers are also responsible for ensuring the carer’s training remains up to date. This may mean providing cover while your carer updates their skills.
4. Carers need clear guidelines, including documentation and agreed processes. They should record medication taken, follow care plans and may need dietary guidance or outlines for regular exercise, physio or other treatments which fit into the daily life of the person they are caring for.
5. Finally, the employer of a carer needs to have a plan for what happens if their chosen carer falls ill or is unable to work for other reasons. A contingency for emergency cover should definitely be built into the budget for care.

The Home Care Agency perspective

Lucy Perkins is the Director of Care at Enviva Care, a specialist Live-In Care Agency. She says, “We find recruiting live-in carers extremely tough. We have refined our recruitment process over many years to allow us to identify carers who have been dishonest about their past employment. Additionally, our ten day training and induction programme helps us to assess a carer over a period of time, long enough to identify potential issues.”

She goes on to talk about where those less than honest and less than genuine carers can end up  working for families who lack the capacity to spot their weaknesses in good time and whose recruitment processes will probably be less rigorous than those of regulated Home Care Providers. “You can’t expect someone recruiting a carer for the first time to be as experienced as someone who may have been doing it for years. Providing high quality care is not only about recruiting the right carer, but also about ongoing supervision and monitoring. This is just one of the many reasons to consider carefully the benefits of a CQC (Care Quality Commission) registered agency. We often receive calls from families who have sourced carers directly and things have gone wrong. Sadly. this often leaves a vulnerable person without care if the private arrangement ends suddenly.”

How to find a home care provider

Visit the UK Home Care Association website and check out your potential provider before deciding which one to use. Many home care providers are registered with the Care Quality Commission, meaning the results of their annual checks are available online.

This article was provided by Targeted Recruitment, publishers of  www.homecarework.co.uk and www.liveincarejobs.co.uk