Tag Archives: Older care

Sorry, love: Harrogate care home will use ‘darling’, despite CQC warning

Skills 4 Living centre to continue to use terms of endearment, while CQC says individual preferences must be respected

A carer holding a patient’s hand. Photograph: Terry Vine/Blend Images/Corbis

A Harrogate care home has vowed to continue using terms of endearment such as “love” and “darling” in spite of a warning from inspectors.

The Harrogate Skills 4 Living centre was told to improve its caring after inspectors from the Care Quality Commission (CQC) overheard carers using terms that “could be regarded as demeaning and patronising”.

Revealed: the hidden lives of the UK’s 6.5 million carers

Caring is an activity most of us will do at some point in our lives but it usually goes on behind lace curtains.

Top photographer Chris Steele-Perkins aims to change that by putting caring into sharp focus in his latest exhibition
Dawn Hart and her twins, Grace and Ethan, who are both severely disabled. Dawn and her husband, Garry, are both full-time carer, as 6.5 million other Britons. Photograph: Chris Steele-Perkins/Magnum

Dawn Hart’s son, Ethan, had only been at home from hospital for six days when he stopped breathing. It was midnight on a Sunday and she was breastfeeding him in bed.

Older women become primary carers during partner's final days, research shows

The role of the family is crucial

New research shows that older women are often the primary carers for their partner when they reach the end of their life.

More than 60% of informal care is provided by a spouse or partner – mainly women between the age of 35 and 64.