So I put together a folder that introduced her: so it had her picture, it had messages from us all to encourage her, and it basically told them what she ate and what she didn’t eat. So like she doesn’t drink cow’s milk, she has powdered milk, doesn’t eat minced meat, doesn’t eat pork, things like that, and it was all ignored, and I understand to a degree, we were in a pandemic, you know there’s lots going on, but it was just all ignored and it was having a major impact on how she was recovering. So we had that conversation, so we started going up every day to feed her and taking food that she would eat, and she began to recover. You know, she would sit up, we would play music for her, because music’s something that she absolutely loves, she’ll just sit there all day you know on repeat with her favourite music. And so we did stuff like that and she would get… coming back to herself,you know, getting well.

Because she spent a lot of time on a ward by herself, and so she declined rapidly with the dementia. When she was released, she was sent to rehab, she was put in a room with no TV, and a member of staff told me she likes looking out the window, so again we had to you know advocate on her behalf: ‘she needs to have a TV and we need to continue feeding her, and we’d bring the food up every day,’ and she started to decline again because she was spending so much time on her own that we then advocated for her to be discharged early, and if they sent her home, we could care for her. So did that battle with social services and the hospital, got her home: they then suspended her care package and placed her with a… excuse me, [coughs] sorry, placed her with a care agency, a completely new care agency, who sent five different carers in within the first week of her being at home.

I’d moved in by then to provide round-the-clock care for her, and one Sunday a carer came and… and really unpleasant in her approach, and my lady just sat on the toilet and screamed and just became really hysterical, and so I asked the carers to leave, went back, advocated with adult social care, you know, that they were using a systematic approach that was detrimental to her wellbeing, you know, and we needed her carers back, we needed her routine back, everything that she was familiar with, that’s what we needed to have in place to nurse her back you know to her self, and you know we did battle and we were able to get her direct payment reinstated, and that’s how we nursed her back.

And I think this is what cultural competency is about, it’s not about being an expert about everybody’s culture, but it’s having an understanding of what’s important to people. And so what does it mean you know to be Roman Catholic? What does it mean to Muslim? What does it mean to be you know Christian or of a particular denomination? What does that mean and how does it playout in the everyday or somebody’s life, you know? And it’s the same as food, you know, you don’t need to be… as a carer, you don’t need to be able to cook everything. I was born… born in the UK, my parents are from [Caribbean island]: she’s from [another Caribbean island], both of those islands have different ways of cooking, but it’s just understanding that. You know, and so when cooking: how would you do it? You know, and so just that engagement, rather than: ‘here’s your lunch,’ you know, but just sort of bringing back those daily activities, those daily memories, and it can be done; I’m absolutely convinced it can be done.

Because she spent a lot of time on a ward by herself, and so she declined rapidly with the… with the dementia. When she was released, she was sent to rehab, she was put in a room with no TV, and a member of staff told me she likes looking out the window, so again we had to you know advocate on her behalf: ‘she needs to have a TV and we need to continue feeding her, and we’d bring the food up every day,’ and she started to decline again because she was spending so much time on her own that we then advocated for her to be discharged early, and if they sent her home, we could care for her. So did that battle with social services and the hospital, got her home: they then suspended her care package and placed her with a… excuse me, [coughs] sorry, placed her with a care agency, a completely new care agency, who sent five different carers in within the first week of her being at home.

I’d moved in by then to provide round-the-clock care for her, and one Sunday a carer came and… and really unpleasant in her approach, and my lady just sat on the toilet and screamed and just became really hysterical, and so I asked the carers to leave, went back, advocated with adult social care, you know, that they were using a systematic approach that was detrimental to her wellbeing, you know, and we needed her carers back, we needed her routine back, everything that she was familiar with, that’s what we needed to have in place to nurse her back you know to her self, and you know we did battle and we were able to get her direct payment reinstated, and that’s how we nursed her back.

And to be honest I hadn’t really thought of myself as her carer, I was just like, this is a member of staff, former member of staff, even if it was one of our clients, she’s not the first person that we’ve taken care of in that way, because you just won’t… well, we just wouldn’t let somebody slip through the net, so you… you stand in that gap. I think it was last year when I realised that the impact of it, you know, trying to do a full… run a service, the pressures of that service, yeah, it impacts your time on your… your family time, you need the support of your family to be able to do that. But it… you know, it has its peaks, it has its highs and its lows, or its intensities when you really had to be there, as was the case when she came out of hospital; whereas now, everything’s quite on a level, it’s on a nice balance, and so… yeah.