Review Time
I have been working for home instead east Herts for almost one year now and i love it there
I get to meet very lovely clients who i enjoy caring for and the management team is the best and always on top of things.👏
Our mum and dad have an hours care two days a week and we have been very impressed with the quality of care provided. The two carers have become like family to our 90+ year-old parents. We are also very impressed with the way that Home instead keep in constant communication with us by phone letting us know if they feel anything is of concern. If there’s anything that we are unhappy about they immediately take action.We would not hesitate to recommend them to anybody else. 
After developing complications following surgery, my Mum needed daily care. Lianne, from Home Instead, came out to meet us, and Mum, and twice daily care was started 2 days later. From the outset, the service provided, on all levels, has been exemplary. We would wholeheartedly recommend Home Instead.
Our Uncle in Surry had Home instead carers visiting since summer last year. He said the ladies who came where lovely and brightened his day. At the start they helped with meals and shopping, but he did need more nursing style care for the last 3m and they did this really well. Office team were good.
If I could rate the carers and the office separately, this would be a five-star review stapled to a one-star bin fire. Let’s start with the good: the frontline carers were wonderful. Compassionate, skilled, patient - the kind of people who make you believe in humanity again. If I could hire them directly, I would in a heartbeat. Now for the office. Oh, the office. Imagine paying £40 an hour for administrative chaos. Of that, the carers (I asked them directly) were earning £12.50. The care manager looked me in the eye and told me they were paid £20 - which was, shall we say, a creative interpretation of the truth. So we were effectively handing over £27.50 per hour to fund spelling mistakes, delays, and a customer service style best described as “Kafka meets Carry On.” We asked - repeatedly - for carers not to wear PPE while preparing Mum’s food, since it’s both unhygienic (same gloves/aprons used for personal care!) and environmentally wasteful. We sent evidence. We explained that the rustling aprons distressed her and that the blue gloves frightened her. We were ignored. We also requested that staff speak to Mum in a normal voice. She’s not deaf, and she’s certainly not five years old. Yet Hannah from the office persisted in addressing her in what I can only describe as a “sing-song nursery voice,” like she was auditioning for CBeebies: The Dementia Edition. It was patronising, demeaning, and infuriating. Staff turnover? Astronomical. Every week seemed to bring a new face - which is exactly what you don’t want when you’re paying a premium for “continuity of care.” Communication from the office was appalling: curt, error-riddled emails that read like someone had fed an instruction manual through Google Translate twice. Invoices arrived late. Payments were taken late. When they wanted something, they expected instant compliance. When we needed answers, it was like shouting into a void lined with clipboards. In short: fantastic carers trapped under an incompetent management structure. If you want to pay through the nose for stress, misinformation, and amateur-hour admin, this is the company for you. If you want real value, honesty, or even basic respect for your loved one - look elsewhere.
They went to visit my mother who has Alzheimer’s to talk to about some care. The care plan they came up during the 2-hour meeting was a daily visit of one hour. To get my mother out of bed, make sure she shower, and then make her breakfast, the price for this would cost a total of £282.50 per week, which equate to the sum of £14690.00. In my opinion this is daylight robbery for 7 hours work of only one carer per week. My mother who has Alzheimer’s was then asked to sign the ‘Service Agreement’. After speaking to my mother around 1 hour after the end of the visit she had absolutely no recollection of the visit from Home Instead, let alone of her signing any ‘Service Agreement’. Later that afternoon Home Instead emailed me the ‘Service Agreement’ and a ‘Direct Debit’ form, after I read it in detail it was clear that my mother did not have the finances to pay for such care. I them emailed Latitia Fadey at Home Instead who had emailed me the ‘Service Agreement’ and also, who was the person who went to visit my mother to say we would not be going ahead with the care because my mother just simply cannot afford the care on offer from Home Instead. Within two hours I received a reply from Latitia saying that it was absolutely fine but my mother needs to pay £150 for an ‘Admin’ charge.In my opinion this company ply on sick, elderly and vulnerable people, and put profits before anything else, shameful behaviour.In the end after a fight I managed to get Home Instead to wave the £150 ‘Admin’ charge.
My message is to be very careful, cross question the manager and get all the small print checked. I guess that each 'Home Instead' will be different depending on the manager and the carers. My mother had care every morning for an hour initially then care in the evening for an hour. The evening care was charged £1 extra without our knowledge. Ok, only £1 but we should have been advised. Very often the morning carer would be so efficient that she left after around 35 minutes.We had a schedule or part of a schedule, of carers each week with not nearly enough consistency.Speaking of consistency, the carers did not keep each other up to date. I was speaking to my mother on the phone one day when the carer asked me if the sheets needed changing. As I live 1.5-2 hours away, I had no idea.Different carers came and went with my mother having to get used to new ones all the time. The worst part was that when my mother's medication dosage changed 75 mc one day then 100 mcg the next and for almost 4 weeks, no one kept a log of which level had been given each day meaning that she had the wrong dose on several occasions. My son checked this when he visited and sent me details and I took photographs of meds in their packages. Despite my request to check, food that had gone off was left in the fridge.Some carers, two of them particularly, were excellent, spending time talking to my mother, and I have given this feedback to the managerconcerned, Despite all of this (and more) they are trying to charge my mother over £300 for days of care that she didn't have. I can see from other reviews that some areas have extremely good care, so please be careful.
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Home Instead provides tailor-made, flexible care at home for the elderly to enable everybody to live independently at home regardless of their age. Learn more about how we can help.
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