I can get the feeling of hurt you experienced in these transactions. I also have a responsibility for an Aunt who is in a private care home now. But what I cannot understand where the Saudi element relates.
The Saudi element arrises due to the fact that many of the care home groups, certainly in this area and I believe more widely, have sold their property assets to Saudi investment groups. They now rent the properties back on a basis similar to the disastrous PFI schemes of a few years ago. I assume that the owners weren't getting rich enough, fast enough.
What you are describing is a failure of the NHS to invest state funds in care for the elderly, and a distancing from the Service aspect of a Health Service. The Saudis ,if involved,have one interest, Profit.
I agree completely, care for elderly people is not an industry, it's a service. In the present climate, the residents aren't looked upon as people in need of care, they are viewed as units of profit and each penny spent looking after one unit is a penny less in the pockets of the owners.
A friend who I run with works as a carer in a local home owned by a consortium of GPs. They also own a couple of other care homes. They sold all three properties to a Saudi investment group five years ago. The care fees for a self funded resident is over £4K / month. He (in his mid fifties) and the other carers earn just over minimum wage. He's convinced the GPs chemically cosh the residents to enable the staffing levels to be kept to the absolute bare minimum at all times, thus maximising the yield from each resident unit. (I deliberately use cold & callous language to highlight what a heartless & mercenary regime exists behind the the caring work done by those on barely a living wage.)
What you are also indicating is that there was a level of corruption with the people in Social Services you were dealing with. This is very much at odds with the majority of your previous postings.
I wouldn't go as far as to say there is corruption within Social Services. What happens is this & I will use rounded numbers to illustrate the point. It's also important to distinguish between Private & "Private" care homes. Most, if not all, in this area are "Private" in that they are run for profit. The "Private" care homes take both self funders and those with no means to pay, the latter being funded by the authority. Private care homes are the likes of BUPA, Nufield and other providers. They charge much higher fees and will be 100% self funders.
In a "Private" home, if the owners want to make £3K per month per unit, the local authority will be buying places for say £2K per unit. The owners charge the self funders £4K, so as well as paying for their own care, they are paying 33% of someone else's. This is 100% true and it is the only way that care for the elderly can continue at the moment. This situation continues until the cash-cow resident has been rinsed down to £20K worth of assets at which point state funding kicks in.
This is why Social Services hate people paying for care with BUPA and the other similar providers who only take self-funders and not state funded residents. They won’t discount state places and make up the shortfall from the self funders. In my aunt's case, they went to the BUPA care home and presented a list of fictitious ailments and disabilities and actively tried to persuade them that they weren't capable of catering for her specific needs. They were & they did for the final 4 years of her happy life.
I think my brother would have put the social worker in a care home at one stage, had he been able to get his hands on him, but we pursued a complaint against him instead. We had documents to evidence the fact that the social worker had lied, but the management weren't interested. They wrote to say he had been "reprimanded" which in social worker speak is FA, lessons learnt, and other meaningless words. They are Nazis and behave with arrogance.
But to summarise, care for the elderly is a scandal, it's disgusting, but we don't complain about it because it doesn't affect us....yet, and those suffering and affected by this vile profiteering system are too vulnerable to complain. The whole system should be run by and funded by the NHS in its entirety.
I don't think I can do anything about it except look after number one (me & the wife) by making sure we have a plan to try and fund ourselves out of this misery if the time comes.
