\n<\/p>\n
O<\/span>ver the summer, BBC Scotland journalist Catriona MacPhee went undercover, working as a cleaner at the Castlehill Care Home in Inverness. The home \u2013 part of Simply Inverness Ltd, itself an offshoot of the company Morar Living \u2013 promises a comfortable, even luxurious standard of care for up to 88 residents. When Kerry first looked at the home with her mother, Jessie, she wanted to move in too, she says. But by the time you finish MacPhee\u2019s hour-long film, you will have little doubt that the image Castlehill presents to the outside world \u2013 complete with champagne and fine dining \u2013 couldn\u2019t be further from the appalling reality.<\/p>\n MacPhee meets residents like Teasha, who has dementia and has also used a stoma bag for 35 years. Due to the poor or often absent care at Castlehill, the stoma is now causing her significant discomfort and she is often seen crying out in distress. In one clip, filmed covertly by MacPhee, a member of staff describes Teasha as \u201cmental\u201d. It\u2019s abhorrent, but within the wider context of the neglect and even intimidation endured by those at Castlehill on a daily basis, it is far from surprising. MacPhee finds residents left wearing incontinence pads for more than 12 hours; human excrement on chairs in the lounge; and one woman who hasn\u2019t had a shower in weeks. Castlehill is short-staffed, and even as the regulator begins to ask questions (there\u2019s a surprise visit from the Care Inspectorate in MacPhee\u2019s first week on the job), it\u2019s clear that this place isn\u2019t just mildly inadequate but deeply dysfunctional and dangerous. At one point, Kerry took Jessie home with her; nobody noticed as they left the building.<\/p>\n MacPhee\u2019s investigation was triggered by a number of complaints about the home, including one made by Su, who recalls the horrific scenes she herself caught on a hidden camera. She watched in horror as a carer and housekeeper colluded with one another, threatening to hit her father, who has dementia. When Su saw the housekeeper grab her father by the wrist and pin him to his bed, she called the police. Her police complaint would become a social services issue, and when they told the home about the hidden camera, her father was barred from having guests. Su\u2019s father has since left Castlehill; she says that carers were still noting him as being asleep and comfortable in bed on their app when he was no longer living there.<\/p>\n Su\u2019s complaint was upheld in full by the Care Inspectorate. In fact, says MacPhee, no other care home in Scotland had as many complaints upheld against it last year as Castlehill. It\u2019s easy to see why: the home is so stretched that when Teasha\u2019s daughter Vanessa visited every day, she found herself more or less taking on the role of a carer. But, beyond being stretched, there\u2019s also the sense that many staff simply don\u2019t care enough. MacPhee\u2019s hidden camera footage shows Teasha in major distress, yet being frequently ignored by staff she knows well. One of MacPhee\u2019s colleagues \u2013 her face blurred for obvious reasons \u2013 recounts how other colleagues told her that somebody needed to be changed while she was with another resident, instead of doing it themselves. \u201cThere\u2019s principles and they don\u2019t have it,\u201d she says, wearily. \u201cIt\u2019s common decency.\u201d<\/p>\n But is it so common after all? Based on everything we see in the film, there\u2019s often very little concern for the welfare \u2013 never mind the quality of life \u2013 of the people who live at Castlehill. And while some staff are clearly trying, the general picture is bleak. Linda breaks down when she sees footage of her mother-in-law, Rachel, being forced to receive intimate care from a male staff member, against the wishes stated in her care plan. \u201cThey\u2019ve seriously let us down \u2026 they\u2019ve let her down,\u201d she says with tears in her eyes. And even when the home does manage to get the basics right, there is little stimulation for many of these people, whom MacPhee encounters sitting in the same position for hours on end. This, in turn, leads to more rapid cognitive decline.<\/p>\n The film briefly considers what can be done to improve the sector (such as recruiting more staff), but the truth is that it needs the kind of radical overhaul that would require several hours more airtime to truly dissect. But what it does do \u2013 brilliantly, blood-boilingly \u2013 is to show us just how grim it can be, and how much money is being made in the process. Teasha\u2019s self-funded place at Castlehill cost \u00a37,033 a month, while Morar Living is expected to make \u00a390m in pre-tax profits over the next five years. While the company didn\u2019t provide a spokesperson for interview, in a statement it said that each resident is consistently monitored and evaluated; that a clinical lead had been appointed; and the number of zero-hours staff had been reduced to zero. It also said it would invest \u00a31m to refurbish Castlehill, and that recent improvements had been noted by the Care Inspectorate. Regardless, I really hope its shareholders were watching.<\/p>\n Disclosure: Care Home Undercover aired on BBC Two and is on iPlayer now.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Over the summer, BBC Scotland journalist Catriona MacPhee went undercover, working as a cleaner at the Castlehill Care Home in Inverness. The home \u2013 part of Simply Inverness Ltd, itself an offshoot of the company Morar Living \u2013 promises a comfortable, even luxurious standard of care for up to 88 residents. When Kerry first looked<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":25221,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[55],"tags":[15251,8540,165,15249,1929,15252,12750,456,5593,2921,1085,1779,15250],"class_list":{"0":"post-25220","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-social-issues","8":"tag-bloodboiling","9":"tag-brilliant","10":"tag-care","11":"tag-disclosure","12":"tag-documentary","13":"tag-exposes","14":"tag-grim","15":"tag-home","16":"tag-radio","17":"tag-reality","18":"tag-review","19":"tag-television","20":"tag-undercover"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25220","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=25220"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25220\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/25221"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=25220"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=25220"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=25220"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}