A care home resident was hit by a carer and had his food eaten by staff in the days before his death, undercover footage has revealed.
Ron Carter, 82, died at The Gables in Whittlesey, Cambridgeshire, in May 2020 about six months after moving in. A hidden camera disguised as a clock in his room recorded what the care regulator has called “awful abuse”.
HC-One, which ran home, said the behaviour was “unacceptable” and has apologised to the family.Nobody has faced criminal charges in relation to the incidents captured in the recordings in May 2020.
Two people were arrested, while police found eight other carers’ “actions as captured on the covert footage were not compatible with their role”. HC-One said it removed the agency staff involved “as soon as concerns were raised” and stopped using the company concerned.
Mr Carter’s daughter Max Carter said: “I think, to me in my eyes, dad had been through so much abuse in that care home, he let himself go.”
She said her retired electrician father was “full of life” and “liked helping everyone”, but was diagnosed with vascular dementia and Alzheimer’s in 2016.
Mr Carter’s family, knowing about stories of abuse at care homes, installed the camera in order to protect him.
He died on 15 May 2020, and Ms Carter has been left “wishing” she viewed the footage before he was cremated, without a post-mortem examination to find a conclusive cause of death.
A care worker hitting Mr Carter on the morning of 13 May, 2020, after which he can be heard crying out in apparent pain
Mr Carter is seemingly vocal in distress at times when carers are in the room, and appears to tell one care worker “I don’t like it here”
He was diabetic but staff on numerous occasions can be seen eating his food
Other residents wandering in and out of Mr Carter’s room around the time a Covid outbreak was ongoing at the home, all at the height of pandemic restrictionsMs Carter said a carer with her father on the morning of his death was “unaware that he was washing someone that wasn’t there anymore”.
She said he was “undressing dad in an angry way, ripping his vest off and chucking it on the floor and then trying to pull this sheet from under my dad which, literally, he was a dead weight.”
After the alarm was raised it then appeared to take nearly six minutes for carers to confirm Mr Carter had a “do not resuscitate order” in place, an order his family said they did not know about.
Since Mr Carter’s death, The Gables and HC-One’s four other care homes in Cambridgeshire have all closed down over failings.
In relation to Mr Carter’s case, a spokesman for the company, which still runs nearly 300 homes in the UK, said: “The behaviour described is unacceptable and we send our deepest apologies and condolences to Mr Carter’s family. We do not tolerate any kind of mistreatment of our residents and co-operated fully with the police during their investigations
Source: BBC
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