Website of the Department of Health
Please note that this website has a UK government access keys system.
Page menu
You are here:
- Home >>
- Social care >>
- Social care reform >>
- Dignity in care
What you are telling us about dignity in care: week four
-
Last modified date:9 February 2007
We also had a greater proportion of surveys completed by professionals compared to members of the public. Responses from professionals accounted for over two thirds of the results. In previous weeks it has been around half.
Good examples of dignity in care services
Again, the quality of dignity in care experiences was seen as variable depending on the person providing the care and where it was being provided. Specialist and smaller services (such as hospices, district hospitals and district nursing services) were cited as best examples.
The following are characteristics of services which people felt helped provide dignity in care:
- Providing holistic care which addresses both health and social care needs
- Involving service users in how they want services to be provided
- Taking into account people's cultural and religious needs in providing care
- Treating people as individuals with their own thoughts and preferences
Some professionals stressed the need for staff to receive training in dignity and that the only way dignity can be enforced is for it to be a major part of the culture of a social care organisation:
- "We try very hard to ensure dignity is maintained at all times, and failure to uphold the core values of care can lead to disciplinary action"
Disrespect for dignity in care services
- "My experience is to be dismissed as tiresome if trying to advocate for a patient, whether it be their dignity, safety or wellbeing"
However, other professionals commented that their place of work did indeed respect people's dignity:
"The Trust I work for has some areas of excellent care where the dignity of all patients, carers and staff are high priority"
Again, professionals commented that if staff are not treated with dignity by their employer then this can influence how they behave towards service users:
- "I think that a lack of respect for a person's dignity is shown to staff more than to patients in my experience, particularly in the NHS"
This week, there were very few descriptions of distressing instances of lack of dignity. However, regrettably, one person did describe how an individual had experienced violence and sexual abuse through the care services they received.
What action you took
Similar to other weeks, the majority of people who said they were able to do something said their action was to bring it to the attention of the people either in charge of or running the service. Most of these people, however, did not feel the outcome of their complaint was satisfactory. They also felt that as service users or family members they were powerless to improve the situation because those people running the service did not want to act on their complaint.
Some people suggested that vulnerable adults should ideally have an advocate to complain on their behalf, because it helps to have someone to support them when they are challenging management or an organisation.
Again, some professionals said they had tried to complain about situations where dignity was not being respected but were unable to bring about change because they did not have the support of managers running the services:
- "People are powerless to stop these managers, including staff representatives"
- "Despite trying from a senior level, all managers care about is numbers and targets"
However, some professionals described how they had either raised awareness of dignity or taken small steps to improve services themselves through:
- Sharing best practice on dignity with colleagues
- Using the incident reporting system when there has been a 'breach' of dignity
- Introducing a system for assisting frail people to eat at mealtimes
- Setting up a benchmark to measure how care and nursing standards are being given.
Suggestions for how Government and service providers can help
Similar to the surveys completed in earlier weeks, improving complaints procedures and providing better training and education for staff came out as key areas in which you thought providers of services and Government should focus.
Again, people said that complaints systems needed to be simpler to use.
People said the Government should be tackling resources. Pressure on staff time seemed to be a major cause of care workers not being able to treat services users in a dignified way. A few people commented that having less time to spend with people can lead to a lack of attention to detail:
- "Reduce pressure on staff time so they can spend time on the small things. It is the failure to do the little things - such as helping someone fasten shirt buttons properly - that starts the cycle whereby dignity is no longer considered important"
New issues raised which the Government or providers should look at were as follows:
- Recognise that carers play an important role in society
- Ensure continuity in the way that staff behave to service users (i.e. at the point of 'handover' after a shift ends, staff could communicate to eachother about the needs of each individual service user).
Top three priorities for Government
The top three priorities for Government action were:
- Make sure that caring and basic nursing skills are given the same importance as achieving targets
- Improve the pay of carers in order to recruit the right kind of people into caring professions
- Provide formal training to staff on what dignified care looks like
Other priorities and ideas suggested by people included:
- Introduce a whistleblowing policy to make complaints
- Insist upon the Medical & Nursing Director reporting on dignity
- Set national targets to measure dignity
- Set up an independent body to investigate complaints
- Advertise the importance of dignity in the media
- Empower the voluntary sector to provide advocacy services
- Re-instate the Patient's Charter
- Survey people on whether they were treated with dignity.
Your general comments
Some new issues emerged from the general comments.Ã' These were:
- Care given by Agency staff can be variable or of a lower quality than permanent staff
- Respecting dignity is part of a wider problem in society and needs to be tackled through education
- Care services have grown too large - smaller services are more friendly
A number of issues mentioned in previous weeks also came up again in this section, including:
- Criticism of private sector organisations putting profit before care
- Historical tendency for older people to be treated with disrespect and complacency in challenging this
- Criticism that all health and social care staff should treat people with dignity, not just a "dignity nurse"
- Low staffing levels need to be addressed
|
|---|
Access keys
