Carer Supervision?

Our health hasn’t been too good for a few years and we’ve learned to adapt as the months & years pass. When we’re at home we manage very well with the help & happy company of some carers (care givers) and our family too. We have experienced some changes of carers over the past 6 years and all of them soon settled into our requirements & needs. Our present people are Carol, Claire & Shelley who share the hours between themselves and they always let us know in advance if any changes happen to their routine calls. However, Carol came on Sunday and brought another woman called Vera who was her supervisor it seemed. Apparently Vera had met Carol and told her she would be ‘observed’ on this call to witness that all was satisfactory and as the ‘clients’ had requested.  As all of this was explained to us I got a little angry, I felt it wasn’t correct to suddenly appear and ‘check’ Carols work routine like that. Also it wasn’t correct to enter our home with that motive without our prior knowledge because we would feel that we were being ‘observed’ too in a way that could feel uncomfortable and invasive.

I told Vera that we would prefer her to leave and let Carol attend to us as she has always done, alone & very competently. Vera seemed to be quite shocked at my comments and said she felt that she ought to be able to monitor staff in clients homes to check everything was alright. I told her that she could have informed us before her visit and although we are very satisfied with all 3 of our carers, it isn’t a correct manner to check on them in this way. Obviously Carol would ‘react’ differently if she was being watched and our comfortable acceptance of care from Carol was spoiled if another person was hovering and observing. Reluctantly Vera left our home and we could see that Carol wasn’t happy about this situation happening. She apologised to both of us saying that it was a rare but accepted method of managers supervision. After Carol had left us later that morning, I rang the office of her employers to make our thoughts quite clear to them that we completely object to having carers monitored in this way in our home, I said I felt that it was not only unfair to the carers it was invasive & incorrect to suddenly impose a supervisor into our home without prior notice, our privacy was being invaded and our personal needs were indeed very personal and not for ‘monitoring’ in this way.

I have just received a return phone call of apologies and assurances that this situation will not happen again, also they say that they will be reviewing how they monitor & assess their staff in future systems. We now feel a little uncertain with the company, but all 3 of our carers are wonderful and like friends to both of us now, we don’t want to jeopardise them in any way.