Vicarage Court Care Home

Thank you for your review. We are sorry to hear that you were not fully happy with the care. You were with us for 7 months during which time, we spent many hours talking with yourself as you struggled with the palliative care process that your mother was going through. Your mother had mental health needs as well as physical health needs. The manager pointed this out to you on occasion as we do not cater for mental health. We are a general nursing home. However you insisted that you did not wish her to be anywhere else every time the manager brought this up. The emotional rollercoaster that you were going through yourself made communication difficult.
You state it a disgrace that your mother weighed 6 stone. Can we please remind you that your mother's weight was 6.8 stone on admission. For the 7 months, we cared for her, much of it was on palliative care. You admitted to myself that you appreciated the staff and the care during that period. We are the highest-staffed care home in the area, but in an ideal world, we would love to have more staff. We recognise they work hard.
The room you were originally in the Forget Me Not was a relatively new room. The room on the middle was due to be refurbished, however, due to the needs of your mother, she needed immediate nursing care, and that was the only room we had. New buzzers and a new pressure mat were ordered and then fitted. We agree that it was not as nice as the refurbished rooms and it has now been upgraded.
Please accept our condolences again as it's 6 months since your mother passed away. We wish you well and we aim to always improve from feedback.

Thank you for your review and we are saddened that your experience was not positive. We received no complaint from yourself during the 4 weeks that your relative was in the home and we were surprised by your review. As a result, we requested to meet yourself face to face to go through each allegation. We were disappointed that you declined to meet. Further we were confused that if you have these feelings, why you did not have a discussion with us during the 4 weeks and only communicated via this review weeks later.
We feel your review contains many inaccuracies which we must address: -
1)   You state that your relative never saw a doctor. In fact, your relative saw a doctor 6 times during 4 weeks stay. During a time of NHS and GP services in crisis, the fact we managed to get 6 GP visits in 4 weeks in substantial.
2)   You state he was locked in a room. All of our rooms have special handles, so a resident can never be locked in. Further on a unit where other residents are living with dementia, you would not want to be continuously disturbed by wandering residents, hence rooms cannot be opened without a key from outside, effectively very similar to everyones front door. A simple conversation about this with us would have led to you being given a key or other options to resolve the issue.
3)   We request that using volatile language like “prison cell” and “asylum” is not helpful. The residents we care for are human beings. We have 80 rooms in the care home, of which 65 of them are identical to the one you had. We feel your description of the room is inaccurate. All the other residents and families are very happy with the rooms. The windows open in two different ways. None of them are locked but are restricted as per care home regulations. A simple conversation with us and we could have showed how to open them.
4)   Water is freely available in the home. We have hydration stations, hydration trolleys and many rooms have jugs. Tea, coffee and biscuits are also freely available.
5)   We asked you to come in to meet us so we can go through your experience with the staff. We have pictures of the staff in reception and any staff you have had a negative experience with can be addressed. We were disappointed that you chose not to do this, but also make a derogatory comment like, ‘they all look the same’
We like to build long term relationships with residents and families and we feel we have done that over 30 years of this care home's history. Unfortunately, due to the current crisis in the NHS hospitals, we have been requested to help out the local hospitals with this temporary contract where residents come in for 4 weeks until they are ok to go home. This NHS crisis is far from ideal and it creates frustration in many families with the broken system. We too have huge frustrations with the system. As a result of this, we have not been able to foster the relationships with families under this contract that we usually do. We are now bringing in steps to ensure better communication.
We are still open to meeting yourself and discuss your review and discuss ways in which improvements can be made.