Care home manager receives 'appallingly abusive' phone calls and letters over visit restrictions

A manager of a care home has revealed she has received “appallingly abusive” phone calls and letters due to the care home visit restrictions she has had to put in place.

At the height of the pandemic, over 400 care home residents were dying from COVID-19 every day and all care homes shut their doors to non-essential visitors to protect residents from the disease.

During July and August, care homes were told they could open their doors again to visitors with various restrictions in place. In England, care homes are advised to have visits outside with just one visitor. In Wales and Scotland they are allowed indoor visits with one visitor, with more visitors allowed at outdoor visits.

The care home manager who spoke to carehome.co.uk on the condition of anonymity revealed how her efforts to keep her residents safe has left her on the receiving end of some very “upsetting” abuse.

She said: “I manage a care home and I agree the restrictions appear draconian, but, it is not the fault of the care home. Why then am I receiving the most appallingly abusive phone calls and letters from relatives blaming us totally? We have done everything in our power to facilitate visits.”

She revealed that “One lady who has been particularly abusive has herself had 46 visits since the 2nd June 2020. That is not counting other family visits. The same lady has a family member on our staff who sees the relative four times a week and can communicate with other family members.

"I have read about a lady who has not seen her mother for 6 months! Not the case in our care home. I have lovely caring staff who have been with me for years, now saying they wish to leave as they feel so undervalued due to the level of abuse. There is no recognition for the fact that they all worked through the worst of the pandemic, and we had symptomatic cases that we pulled through, having no deaths in our care home."

With infections now on the rise again in the UK, many care homes have now shut their doors again to visitors, with some local authorities telling care homes they must stop all non-essential visits.

The dementia organisation John’s Campaign and the Residents & Relatives Association (R&RA) want the guidance changed so residents have more than one visitor and there are no time limits on visits. They argue that for people with dementia, separation from their loved ones can cause more harm than the risk of infection.

The care home manager says she has done her best to facilitate visits, opening up her care home to visitors in June.

“We had two residents with two relatives, five visits per day. As you can imagine this gave people lots of opportunity to visit and at that time the weather was quite good. This was contrary to the guidelines but we considered it to be fairly safe as transmission outdoors is practically nil.

“Then unfortunately the weather changed and we had a lot of wind and rain and some visits were cancelled. That is when the phone calls started. Most of them asking me what was I going to do about the weather! I am not sure how anyone would think I had any control over the weather.

“This being the case we changed to indoor visiting. We allocated a room and arranged two metre distancing in the room. Unfortunately because the room has to be cleaned down between each visit we could only manage two visits per day for one hour. That is when things started to get very heated.

“When people were unable to book a visit for at least a fortnight they were very rude on the phone. We asked people to only ring on Monday for appointments but that was ignored and as you can imagine we cannot have the phone tied up constantly as we are a very busy home.”

She does add that it is “only a small minority that exhibit this behaviour but it is still upsetting for myself and my staff. I was told the proposal was draconian, punitive and would cause maximum distress to relatives and residents. That in our efforts to protect from Covid-19 we were failing to acknowledge the damage of isolation.

“We were told we lacked empathy and understanding. I was told in very scathing terms, they are only guidelines, when I tried to explain about the guidelines we had to work to. We had Covid-19 in the home back in April and May.”

The care home manager reveals that her staff “worked tirelessly to pull the affected people through and we had one death, that was in hospital. At that time we had staff shortages due to many staff being so anxious they could not come to work.”

She and another member of staff ended up contracting coronavirus and were both very ill.

“I am not ashamed to say I was extremely frightened. So I make no apology for trying extremely hard to protect the residents. This was an experience I would not wish on anybody, but what appears to have happened is, people have become complacent despite the fact we are seeing rises in confirmed cases.

“They now seem to believe the risk is so minimal that we are just being over the top. I have been asked, why I have alienated relatives and not discussed this with them. Unfortunately this is not open for debate, the guidelines are the guidelines.

“My staff all feel there is no recognition for their hard work and devotion to duty. It’s never about what you did it’s always about what you didn’t do, even if that is through no fault of your own.”

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