Chapter 83: Reference Number
We did it at Priya's kitchen table on the Sunday, because Priya has a printer and I have a phone with a cracked corner.
Her flat is above a bookmaker's on the ring road.
Two rooms, a plant she has kept alive nine years, and a wall of shelves she built herself out of scaffold board.
She made us both write standing up for the first hour, which she said was a thing she had learned from a manager who was otherwise useless.
The first draft was nine hundred words. It was full of the word appeared.
“Cut every appeared,” she said.
“Then half of it goes.”
“Then half of it should go. Half of it is you being frightened of being wrong.”
The second draft was four hundred and ten words, and it was worse.
It had gone flat, and a flat thing does not get read twice.
The third one was right.
It said who she was.
It said who I was, by name, with my date of birth, because Priya said a concern with a source in it has a spine.
It said that I had volunteered at Willow Bank on Wednesday afternoons for three years, unpaid, two hours a week, and that I had ceased attending in December.
It set out four things.
That a medication round took place on the ground floor at approximately two ten each Wednesday, covering twenty-seven residents in rooms one to twenty-seven.
That administration records were signed with initials, and that three sets of initials, K.H., A.J. and T.D., appeared repeatedly.
That the staff rota displayed on the trolley did not, on any Wednesday I ever saw, list K.H. or A.J. as being on duty that day.
That the person whose initials were T.D. had, to my belief, left the employment of the home in the summer of the previous year, and that those initials continued to appear afterwards.
Then a fifth paragraph.
Priya wrote it. I did not want it.
That a resident had said, on more than one occasion, that the round had not been to her, at a time when the round had already passed her door.
“That's hearsay from a woman with dementia,” I said.
“Does she have dementia?”
“I don't know. I never asked. That was not what I was there for.”
“Then write I do not know,” Priya said, “and let them decide what it is worth. Your job is not to weigh it. Your job is to hand it over.”
We put it in twice.
At nine o'clock on Monday morning she rang the adult safeguarding duty line for the county, on speaker, with a pen in her hand.
Eleven minutes of hold music.
Then a woman with a Yorkshire accent and a screen she was clearly typing into as we spoke.
She was good. I want to say that.
She asked three questions I had not thought of.
Whether any resident had been observed in pain or distress.
Whether the home had a nurse on site, or whether medication was given by care staff.
Whether I had ever raised it with the manager.
The last one landed on me like a hand.
“No,” I said.
“That's all right,” she said. “I'm asking so I know what's on the record, not to catch you out.”
She said the concern would be logged and screened, and that screening was a process with timescales.
She could not tell me what would happen next. That was not her decision to make.
Then she gave us a reference number.
Fourteen digits. Priya wrote it down twice, on the form and on the back of her own hand.
The second submission went in online at ten past ten.
The regulator's form has a box near the top that asks who you are.
Are you a member of staff.
Are you a relative or friend.
Are you a member of the public.
There is no box for a woman who pushed a wheelchair down that corridor for three years and cut somebody's fingernails once a fortnight.
Priya ticked member of the public and moved on, because Priya can do that and I cannot.
There is a character limit. We lost eighty words to it and spent twenty minutes deciding which eighty.
We pressed submit at eleven minutes past eleven.
An automated email arrived within four seconds.
It thanked us for our feedback and explained that the Care Quality Commission does not respond to every piece of information it receives.
It had its own reference number, a different one, in a different format.
Priya printed both, dated them in the top right corner in pen, and put them in a plastic wallet.
“That's the whole job now,” she said. “Everything gets a copy and a date. Everything.”
I stood in her kitchen holding a printout of the most dangerous thing I had ever written, and it looked exactly like a receipt.