Paying for social care (older people)

Before I came here, as soon as I got the diagnosis, because my view is you’ve got to give Power of Attorney before rather than later because you, then you lose the ability to be, decide and it becomes complicated. But the problem with that is, speaking as a GP, is that some families abuse it, I do know that, so you have to be able to trust your children or else find someone else to act as Power of Attorney, because I have seen it when children have taken all their parents’ money, basically, and it’s not right. So you have to be able to trust the person and if you can’t, or you’re not sure about the family, then you can get someone else to have the Power of Attorney.

No, no, luckily we were both very much in agreement. I was doing it all but I was keeping my brother informed, because we, the joint Power of Attorney actually was what’s the term? I think on it said joint and severally; so we didn’t have to have agreement to act together but, yes, I did keep him informed, it was, practically it was me doing that, mainly because by that stage I’d given up work in order to cope with the situation so I’d got more time to do it. But no luckily we didn’t have any disagreements, we were, I don’t think, I can’t think of anything that we actually disagreed about.

Well again that was ad, advice that came first from the men’s group and we did get people, sort of, come and give us talks about Power of Attorney, solicitors that would help. So I fancy I know a bit about the law so I [laughs] I just, you know, got information and did it myself and it’s authentic, you know, it, I’ve had the all the stuff and I’ve lodged it with a solicitors, you know, but he didn’t arrange it for me; I wasn’t going to pay his fees for doing something like that [laughter] you know. I may regret that as well [laughs]. So I’ve got two sons in this country who are both, have my Power of Attorney, but I if I’m going to go insane or whatever I have to register that before I go insane. They have Power of Attorney but it’s, it’s not in their hands to do anything at the moment until I say please do it so I’ve got to gauge when I start to make stupid mistakes.

Oh we did that before, when Graham still had capacity after he’d been diagnosed we, I did it all myself, I downloaded all the paperwork and completed it all myself, I didn’t do it through a solicitor because I knew it was perfectly possible to do it yourself and we did; and I did both, lined the paperwork up for both, and at that stage, I’m not sure if you still have to do it, but you needed to go in to talk to somebody, and the most obvious person was the GP, and they had to sort of validate it, interview Graham make sure he wasn’t being coerced and all that sort of stuff. And I booked a, you know, a double appointment to do this with the GP and basically at the end of doing the financial one she’d run out of time, and so I said, “OK, fine, well we’ll come back.” And for whatever reason I didn’t get round to coming back. I also made the big mistake of not registering the LPA at the time that it was done and dusted, because I didn’t fully recognise that that was best practice. I thought well we don’t need it at the moment, Graham perfectly capable and competent, he’s, can manage his own financial affairs; I didn’t realise that he could still do that and have the LPA in place registered. So when I came to register it [a] a big period of time had gone by, which was a query, and [b] it emerged that the GP had not ticked the box that said she was a GP; so the Office of the Public Guardian got involved and said, ooh. Fortunately there was an outbreak of common sense and they realised that the GP, who they had managed to see was still a GP, albeit in Scotland by that time, they realised that she was a pukka GP and they could tick the box and it all happened. But otherwise we were going to have to go through a most tortuous process of having the Office of the Public Guardian come in and, you know, oh thank goodness it didn’t and at that point it was too late to do a welfare one because Graham had lost capacity, so yeah, mm, mm.

Yeah, I seem to remember my, it was a bit of a hassle then, my, because my brother having to go to various banks and things, because they wouldn’t accept copies, he actually had to go and show them the original Power of Attorney and this sort of thing. But it was sort of like minor hassles rather than a major problem.