I wrote this in response to Alexs post yesterday. I was just trying to say that it can work as an individual provider and that is even without the back up she was suggesting. Our single, individual home has been running for 31 years, but we moved in and took over from my parents 26 years ago. My husband and I live here with our residents. Our three boys grew up here with our residents. We both do every job. No CEO, no admin, but the sheer joy of being able, over all those years, to say, yes we can do that and yes we will do this without having to go through fifteen different layers of management above us to get to a decision. That flexibility has been appreciated by a number of families over the years and our residents families play a large part in making the home work with visits and opinions on what we are doing. We currently have four residents and one respite bed. We have been told we are a micro provider which was not a term I had heard before, but when I spoke to other micro providers we all agreed our main strength is flexibility and being able to adapt to suit individual needs. That is purely because the decision is ours and we know our business and our residents well enough to know when we can and when we cant take on a new challenge. We took on our first full time member of staff last year as up until fairly recent years my parents had continued to cover our holidays. Time off is extremely limited but we have loved our work. We are in the middle (hopefully near the end?) of our first and hopefully our last major crisis at the moment, but despite that I would still say that we feel this works. We would have loved the support you are suggesting in your post Alex with things such as payroll, employment law, keeping up with legislation, training costs, tendering for contracts, etc. Funding would need to be sorted out more fairly if others wanted to do this. We have never been paid particularly well and if we apply for extra funding from social services their spread sheets confuse me totally (support would help here too!) and they end up telling us we are not financially viable but not increasing our money! We have continued despite this on what amounts currently to around £12 per hour, so for every hour we employ someone we make a loss after their wage plus all the other expenses of running a home are taken from that. (you can see why we have only just employed someone after all these years!). We have often been asked to open another home or expand this one and if we were money minded people that would have been the way to go, but we decided this home would have been ruined by making it bigger as it would have lost the small family feel, and opening another home would just have meant us trying to split ourselves too many ways, so we felt that could also ruin the quality of this home. Residential homes are held up as a disgrace on so many occasions and sadly I often have to agree. In fact the reason my parents opened this one was because they could not find a home suitable or good enough for my brother, who had Downs Syndrome, so their solution was to set up a home around him instead which they could guarantee the quality of. Our CQC report this year had us in a puddle of tears as, for the first time, they phoned the families of our residents the day after the inspection to ask their opinions on the home directly. Their comments were just wonderful. I would love to see your plan come to fruition!
Posted on: Sun, 27 Jul 2014 10:03:04 +0000
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