Chapter 81: Give Feedback on Care
The library on Ferris Street opens at nine thirty and has four public computers on a bench along the back wall.
You get an hour.
You book it at the desk with your library card and they call your name out.
I used three hours that week and read everything twice.
I made notes in pencil, because they charge for the printer.
Here is what I learned, in the order I learned it, which is not the order it makes sense in.
The regulator is called the Care Quality Commission.
It registers care providers. It inspects them. It can impose conditions.
At the end of a long road it can close a service down.
It also, in plain words on its own website, does not investigate individual complaints.
I read that sentence three times.
It is not hidden. It is not a trick. It is simply not what the organisation is for.
If you have a complaint about a care home, you complain to the care home.
If you are not satisfied you go to the ombudsman, if the placement is council-funded.
If it is privately funded you go somewhere else, and there is a page explaining which.
What you can do with the regulator is give feedback on care.
There is a form. It is titled exactly that.
You describe what you have experienced or witnessed. It goes into what they call intelligence, and intelligence informs inspection.
Informs. That is the word.
It does not trigger. It does not require. It informs.
I want to be fair here.
Since then I have met two inspectors. Both were good at their jobs and both were carrying more services than a person can carry.
The system is not designed to be an emergency cord. It is designed to be a slow accumulation.
If you are the twenty-seventh person to say a thing, you matter enormously.
If you are the first, you are one line in a database.
The second route was better and I found it on the second day, on the county council's site, three clicks down.
Adult safeguarding.
If you believe an adult with care and support needs is at risk of abuse or neglect, you contact the local authority.
The local authority has a duty to make enquiries.
Neglect includes ignoring medical needs. It includes failures in medication.
There is a duty line. There is a form.
There is a thing called a section 42 enquiry, which is a real mechanism with a real obligation attached to it.
Reading about it was the first time in two weeks that my chest let go.
I wrote the number down twice, on two pieces of paper, and put one in my coat.
Then I got to the third thing, and the third thing took the afternoon off me.
Whistleblowing.
There is protection in law for people who raise concerns about wrongdoing at work.
Serious protection. It was fought for.
I read the guidance carefully because I am careful, and about a third of the way down there was a section headed who is protected.
Employees. Workers. Agency staff.
Trainees. Contractors, in some cases.
Then a line, set out plainly, saying that volunteers are generally not covered, because the protection attaches to a worker, and a volunteer is not a worker.
I sat back in a plastic chair in a public library with a man two seats down watching football highlights with no sound.
Three years. Two hours a week.
Two hundred and forty Wednesdays.
No contract. No pay. No hours. No worker status.
There is a category of person who walks through a care home every week and sees everything and is protected by almost nothing, and I had been standing in it since the year I got married.
Then I thought about clause 9.2.
Any information acquired by me in a voluntary or unpaid capacity.
Somebody had drafted that. Somebody had sat down with a keyboard and picked out the exact category of person the law does least for, and then wrapped eleven pages around her.
That was not a template. Templates do not know what you do on a Wednesday.
My hour ran out and the woman at the desk called the next name.
I gave up the chair and put my coat on in the doorway, and stood there a while, watching the automatic doors open and shut twice on nobody at all.
I had two routes. One that informed, and one that had a duty attached.
And I could not walk either of them myself, because I was a defendant with a record, mid-negotiation with the man who owned the building, and anything I said would arrive already explained.
I needed somebody the system would look at without flinching. Somebody with a clean name and a steady job and no file.
I had exactly one, and she had been trying to give me something for eight weeks.