back to article UK's NHS to pilot 'Airbnb'-style care service in homeowners' spare rooms

The NHS has been criticised over plans for an "Airbnb"-style scheme in which homeowners will be paid £1,000 a month to host patients in their spare rooms. Startup CareRooms is working with trusts and councils in Essex. Folks who sign up are asked to cook three microwave meals for their patient each day, provide them with …

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  1. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Waaat?

    Really politicians will believe any shite that gets fed to them by a geezer in an appropriately sharp suit.

    Someone has honestly thought this was a good idea and will save money

    1. Aqua Marina

      I have a cunning business plan.

      Step 1) Now that we’ve all flown the coop my elderly mother lives in a house that has 4 unused double bedrooms, each with ensuite. That’s £4K per month.

      Step 2) Hire a couple of east European workers to come in on a part time shift each during the day to cook and clean. That’ll cost about £1.4 per month.

      Step 3) Cornflakes for breakfast and 2 microwave meals a day, that’s £600 per month.

      Step 4) ??????

      Step 5) Profit!!!!

      This makes me £2K per month, I’m providing work, and as a bonus, my old mum has some company!!

      What possibly could go wrong!

      1. JamesPond
        Stop

        Re: I have a cunning business plan.

        You'll only be able to hire the east europeans up to March 2018! Then you'll have to make do with Brits wo won't want a menial job for £8k per year.

      2. JamesPond
        Joke

        Re: I have a cunning business plan.

        And if they die whilst in your care, even better, don't tell anyone, keep collecting the rent, not outgoings on food and cornflakes. On the yearly council inspection, just tell the inspector that the lodger has gone out for a walk, no one need ever know.

        1. monty75

          Re: I have a cunning business plan.

          I’m going to offer an on-demand maternity service and call it Deliveroo

          1. Anonymous Coward
            Anonymous Coward

            Re: I have a cunning business plan.

            I'm preparing actors to replace the incumbent in a long-running children's sci-fi program. To be called DeliverWho

            1. Aladdin Sane

              Re: I have a cunning business plan.

              Downvote because you called it a "children's sci-fi program".

              1. Chris 239

                Re: I have a cunning business plan.

                @ Alladin

                That's 11 comentards (and counting) without a sense of humour! :-)

          2. monty75

            Re: I have a cunning business plan.

            Oh, and a patient transport service Uberlance.

      3. Rich 11

        Re: I have a cunning business plan.

        What possibly could go wrong!

        Your dear old mum gets arrested for running a brothel which caters to people with similar tastes as Wayne Rooney, after the almighty profit-motive thoroughly infects both her and her, um, residents. But what disgusts you most is that she called the contacts app Greyr.

        1. HelpfulJohn

          Re: I have a cunning business plan.

          Jimmy Saviles by the bucket load?

      4. Oh Homer
        Childcatcher

        How very British

        Next up ... Victory Gardens.

        However, Blighty 2017 is a very different beast to days of yore, and by "different" I mean more PC, cynical and bureaucratic than ever. For a start, I assume that the bean counters who dreamed up this farce are aware that anything even remotely characterisable as "care work" requires PVG certification and a disclosure check.

        In practice this should mean very few people will actually qualify as suitable to care for anyone "vulnerable", even if the full extent of their involvement is a cup of tea and a chat. They'll have a "vulnerable" person trapped inside their house. They might be a communists, terrorists, paedophiles, Pokemon Go players or worse. Think of the children, etc.

        Sadly the days of Mrs. Thomson looking after wee Johnny while his mum is off killing Nazis, without being subjected to a full background check, body cavity search and GPS-tracking ankle bracelet, are long over.

        So how many people will happily submit to a good rectal probing and complete exposure of every minor indiscretion they've committed since birth, just for the promise of putting up a complete stranger with a hysterectomy in the spare bedroom?

      5. macjules

        Re: I have a cunning business plan.

        Local Trust sends you 4 elderly 'recovering' Alzheimer's patients who require 24/7 bed care, won't eat and have to be almost cuffed to the bed because they just want to go home. Their relatives visit and are complaining to all and sundry that you are neglecting them. After 24 hours your East European slaves quit, leaving you almost literally elbow deep in the brown stuff.

        But of course 'No caring experience is required'.

        1. Snorlax Silver badge

          Re: I have a cunning business plan.

          @macjules: Yep, I’d say that’s a pretty accurate forecast of how things would go.

          Why doesn’t the NHS buy a disused warehouse and fill it with bunk beds?

          Something along the lines of the Near-Death Star in Futurama...

    2. JamesPond
      FAIL

      Waaat?

      Care homes are in crisis because councils have cut spending per head, but they can afford £1k per month for this? Going to require some very careful contract wording to persuade anyone to give up a spare bed/bathroom with potentially no ability to turf the 'lodger' out at short notice if they become abusive or incapable of looking after themselves.

      1. katrinab Silver badge

        Re: Waaat?

        Residential care typically costs about £2,600 per month, or about £3,600 per month for nursing care.

        The going rate for a room in Southend is £500. That leaves £500 per month for staff costs, which is nowhere near enough.

      2. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: Waaat?

        @JamesPond - "but they can afford £1k per month for this?"

        To be fair, Care Homes are surprisingly expensive. I worked to pay my way through Uni, that was in 1998-2000, even then they were costing over £1000 a month. Can only imagine its doubled or tripled since then.. Yet it does make one wonder how some many of them have gone out of business!

  2. wolfetone Silver badge

    After 7 years of living under this government, it's getting harder and harder to find the appropriate words to describe how utterly greedy and bat shit insane they are without sounding like a broken record.

    1. Dan 55 Silver badge

      Really NHS management should just give a list of what services they're going to cancel on what date and refer any complaints to the government. Perhaps then the British public might decide to do something about it.

      1. Rich 11

        The BBC is broadcasting a first-draft instruction manual on Saturday nights.

        1. macjules

          You mean 'carry on dancing and forget that the country is plummeting over Beachy Head right now'?

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  4. kain preacher

    SO what's the worse that could happen other than a dead patient.

    Abused patient .

    I shit hole place.

  5. TonyJ

    I can see a lot that could go wrong with this but playing devil's advocate for a second there's a few things that spring to mind that could also be positives such as patients actually having company for a while. Hospitals these days are pushed to breaking point and health care staff struggle to find that kind of time more often than not (and that's no slur on them - they do a fantastic job for the most part).

    Also going with it is an almost one-to-one monitoring (though again, flip side of that coin is a lack of help if something were to go wrong with the patients' health).

    Not sure it's a good idea at all but something that is possibly worth considering for some of the lighter cases, perhaps?

    1. Matthew Smith

      I agree. Its worth giving it a go. I've got a couple of aunties that took early retirement after working in the NHS. If they took in two patients each then they'd get a living wage, two beds in hospitals would be unblocked, and the patients would have company while they recuperated in much better condition than being left on their own all day at home. The only misgiving is how much experience the host needs. No experience at all is asking for trouble.

      1. katrinab Silver badge

        Bear in mind that you get £500 per month if you rent your room out to an able-bodied person who doesn't require food and needs no supervision.

        1. phuzz Silver badge
          Joke

          You get £500 a month for renting the room out, or you get £1000 for renting it out to the NHS.

          However, if you turn it over to growing weed you could be making even more...

    2. Nick Kew

      I can envisage a case in point.

      I have a friend in her 80s, who had to go into hospital for something about a year ago. She lives alone, and normally needs no help. But when she had just been operated, they didn't want to let her out unless there was someone around just in case she needed it.

      If I had a suitable spare room (and known about it at the time), I'd've been happy to offer it. If the NHS were paying, it could go a long way towards making it acceptable to a patient who doesn't want to be any trouble.

      It's just one more step to do the same with strangers.

    3. 7teven 4ect

      Where will the patient's prescription be kept this month? Anything nice?

      What could possibly go wrong?

      1. swampdog

        There is so much wasted. The NHS has screwed up my prescription every time for the last 5 months. Put two IT systems together (NHS + Asda) and what you get is a blame game. Extra appointments to the doc just to sort our paperwork. Doc should be curing folk.

        Combine both those "practice manager" numpties and throw them at my mother. She's happily retired living all on her own. She was.

    4. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Having looked after elderly relatives and friends who normally live alone, I can see where they are coming from in trying to replace low level care with something similar outside of expensive hospital beds to make sure there aren't any complications or patients don't attempt more than they can cope with while they recover.

      BUT I'm yet to be convinced that you can pay people to care and not end up with cases where either the patient or career is screwed by the system. Many of the traditional small scale care homes that have provided this type of care in the past have been pressured by local/central government cost cutting and more regulations to ensure patient safety while driving up costs, resulting in a lack of places. This appears to be an attempt at filling those places and restarting the cost/regulatory spiral at a lower point once again.

  6. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Just when you thought they were the dumbest fucks around, they find new and interesting ways of proving just how dumb they truly are.

  7. This post has been deleted by its author

  8. Jason Bloomberg Silver badge

    Something needs to be done

    Not sure this is the solution but if we don't do anything the problems are simply going to get worse.

    I would have thought the number of people with a spare bedroom and a self-contained bathroom, able and willing to provide the care and services a patient staying would need, would be rather low. It's something which would likely be better served by a hotel, hostel or purpose built facility.

    I can't object to the idea in principle because it seems no worse to me than fostering or putting one's own relatives up. I expect some patients would love it, prefer it.

    It's how we do it which matters. Even officially approved care homes don't always measure-up as they should so I do understand legitimate concerns and fears. Trying to do anything on the cheap, without proper and necessary oversight, usually has unintended and adverse consequences.

    1. Pen-y-gors

      Re: Something needs to be done

      Quite agree that something must be done, the system is falling apart. Our Council are proposing to close the only remaining council-owned care home, because it would cost too much to bring up to scratch. (Question: who's been neglecting maintenance for years? Another question: who's been cutting the funding for the council so they can't afford to do the maintenance?)

      They may have a case - but they have no alternative plan. Where will people needing care go? This suggestion doesn't seem likely to help in more than a tiny percentage of cases.

      And anyway, aren't they doing it on the cheap? £1k/month is in line with a cheap B+B in a shared room, not private en-suite, full-board, and presumably washing, ironing, shopping etc. And how much will the 'management company' slice off the top?

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: Something needs to be done

        (Question: who's been neglecting maintenance for years? Another question: who's been cutting the funding for the council so they can't afford to do the maintenance?)

        Who spent all the money in the first place, leaving us with a vast increase in the national debt, a budget deficit that still isn't under control?

        1. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          Re: Something needs to be done

          "Who spent all the money in the first place, leaving us with a vast increase in the national debt"

          The world banking system, which created an asset bubble which was debt funded.

          1. Anonymous Coward
            Anonymous Coward

            Re: Something needs to be done

            "Who spent all the money...." The world banking system, which created an asset bubble which was debt funded.

            Ignoring the role of the Blair/Brown government in turning a blind eye and failing to regulate, the 2008 crisis was separate from the UK government's budgetary problems that started then and continued ever since. Those problems can also be traced back to Brown.

        2. swampdog

          Re: Something needs to be done

          Well, it started with the labour govt just after the war. They created the NHS and the state pension. The idea was everybody would pay a bit out of their wages until they retired then they'd have a guaranteed pension. Well that worked well, from ringfenced (*) to "oo" (**) to "borrow against it(***)".

          (*) govt

          (**) govt

          (***) govt

      2. JamesPond
        Unhappy

        Re: Something needs to be done

        "who's been cutting the funding for the council "

        The Conservatives, who else!!!±

        In 2011/12 the coalition government closed primary care trusts at the insistence of the Tories. Whist they created CCGs to take on some of the work and funded these (but not to the same extent as the SHA/PCTs), the Tories also moved a lot of the responsibilities for public health into council ownership, without increasing council budgets. This all helped the Tories sell the idea that they had put more money into the NHS, when in fact what they had done was keep the funding the same for the NHS but essentially decreased the funding for Councils. Council funding is a lot less politically sensitive than the NHS and is 'local' rather than national.

      3. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: Something needs to be done

        RE: Our Council are proposing to close the only remaining council-owned care home, because it would cost too much to bring up to scratch. (Question: who's been neglecting maintenance for years? Another question: who's been cutting the funding for the council so they can't afford to do the maintenance?)

        Based on a BBC Radio 4 series on care homes in the UK, it wasn't so much about maintenance not being spent as regulatory requirements making care homes (almost) needing to be purpose built rattan than using converted homes. Things like doors being wide enough to get stretchers to rooms or providing lifts in multi-storey properties where you cannot easily cover the investment if the property is providing care on a smallish scale (<10 residents) that made up a significant portion of short term care facilities in the past, largely staffed by retired nurses who owned the properties.

        My guess is that the Council home is old and doesn't meet the current regulations. And it's hard to justify investing when larger providers appear to be able to provide services at a lower cost. At least until they go bust...

        1. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          Re: Something needs to be done

          Another question: who's been cutting the funding for the council so they can't afford to do the maintenance?)

          My local council are saying the same things. But funnily enough they found the money for music festivals, firework displays, gay poetry celebrations, and a million quid to resurface a hundred yards of pedestrian precinct.

          This "we've got no money and its all the government's fault" is half true. But if the incompetent wankers of local government didn't waste what they have, I'd have a whole lot more sympathy with them.

    2. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Something needs to be done

      Not sure this is the solution but if we don't do anything the problems are simply going to get worse.

      Plenty of things they could do:

      Logan's Run.

      Negotiate a bulk discount with Dignitas.

      Hold a war where the call up age is 50+.

      Put fast acting humane poison in Werther's Originals.

      Hold regular "granny versus lion" events at safari parks and zoos.

      Retrain domestic cats to believe that elderly people are merely large mice.

      Encourage SAGA to offer exceptionally dangerous sports holidays.

      Hack into the Guardian and the Mail, and ensure that the content is switched, causing apoplexy and death to readers in their thousands.

      1. tiggity Silver badge

        Re: Something needs to be done

        @Ledswinger

        "Hold regular "granny versus lion" events at safari parks and zoos."

        The grans would win every time.

      2. Rich 11

        Re: Something needs to be done

        Hold a war where the call up age is 50+.

        A bit like John Scalzi's Old Man's War.

        1. Mike 137 Silver badge

          Re: Something needs to be done

          A well-established principle - see Logan's Run

          1. HelpfulJohn

            Re: Something needs to be done

            "A well-established principle - see Logan's Run"

            "Pebble in the Sky" by Isaac Asimov is a better treatment of the issue. And a better novel.

      3. fidodogbreath

        Re: Something needs to be done

        Retrain domestic cats to believe that elderly people are merely large mice.

        Cats already believe this about humans. That's why they do things like get underfoot when you're at the top of a staircase.

    3. iron Silver badge

      Re: Something needs to be done

      "would likely be better served by a hotel, hostel or purpose built facility."

      And what would we call this purpose built facility? How about Hospital.

      Muppet.

      1. Jason Bloomberg Silver badge

        Re: Something needs to be done

        And what would we call this purpose built facility? How about Hospital.

        Muppet.

        Thanks for that.

        It's people in hospital who don't need to be in hospital, who could be equally served outside hospital, we are talking about here; "We are working with the local health and care community to provide a safe, comfortable place for people to recuperate from hospital".

        It's about dealing with people who are recovering from hip replacements and the like who need to be cared for but don't actually need to be in hospital to get the care they need, who are bed-blocking and preventing other people needing surgery and treatment getting that People who could, and probably would like to, leave hospital if only there were somewhere else for them to get the care they needed.

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