Nursing home care in the United Kingdom
To enter a care home, a candidate patient needs an assessment of needs and of their financial condition from their local council.
A survey of 2,000 adults and 500 carers in March 2022 found that most respondents said reports of conditions in 2020 and 2021 had deterred them from moving a close relative into a care home.
[2] The first government attempts at providing basic care for the elderly and the infirm took place at the dawn of the industrial era with the New Poor Law of 1834.
[3] Mass unemployment followed the end of the Napoleonic Wars in 1815 and the introduction of new technology to replace agricultural workers and the rise of factories in the urbanized towns meant that the established system of poor relief was unsustainable.
Most workers in the workhouse were set tasks such as breaking stones, bone crushing to produce fertilizer, or picking oakum using a large metal nail known as a spike.
Although conditions in the workhouse were intended to be harsh to act as a deterrent, in areas such as the provision of free medical care and education for children, inmates were advantaged over the general population.
By the late 1840s most workhouses outside London and the larger provincial towns housed only "the incapable, elderly and sick".
A Royal Commission of 1905 reported that workhouses were unsuited to deal with the different categories of resident they had traditionally housed, and recommended that specialised institutions for each class of pauper should be established in which they could be treated appropriately by properly-trained staff.
There were at that time 116,564 people aged 65 or over in residential accommodation provided by or on behalf of local authorities, compared with 51,800 patients in NHS hospital departments of geriatric medicine.
[14] In the 1950s and 1960s, the quality of nursing care steadily improved, with the mandatory introduction of central heating, single rooms and en-suite lavatories.
At that level, all income from pensions, savings, benefits and other sources, except a "personal expenses allowance" (currently £24.90 per week), goes towards paying the care home fees.
The Care Quality Commission have themselves implemented a re-registration process, completed in October 2010, which will result in a new form of regulation being outlined in April 2011.
In many private care homes, an investigation found that elderly residents soiling themselves because staff did not attend to them in time, residents with autism suffering inappropriate and disproportionate physical force, patients waiting excessively long after ringing bells because staff are under pressure, elderly residents not treated with respect with underwear exposed and faeces smeared on a cushion, patients put at risk of attack from other patients and medicines handled unsafely.
