Revenge of the Jobsworth - Domiciliary Care and Arifa Farooq

For twelve years now, I've been a carer for my mum who has dementia, and for ten of that twelve years I have had carers coming to the house. I've had several different organisations come, and so I know that home support is a bit of a curate's egg. Good in parts and absolutely rank in others. Amongst those experiences was a very brief brush with Domiciliary Care. I won't go into details, but I suffice to say that I was not in the least surprised to see them appear in a half hour investigative programme filmed by the BBC.

To be fair to Domiciliary Care, the faults that were revealed could be found in any care organisation. Saying you'd been half an hour when you'd only been ten minutes; giving people sandwiches instead of a proper meal (and Quavers); not knowing how to move and handle or how to use a hoist, turning up late; these things happen to a greater or lesser degree in all care organisations. It was the sheer unremitting extent of Domiciliary Care's failings that made it the bogeyman of poor service. At the root of this malaise was South Lanarkshire's auction system for the care contract in their area. All those tendering had to log on to a webpage and the company that bid the lowest got the contract. Corners were cut and the service suffered as a result.

Step forward Arifa Farooq, investigative journalist for the Beeb. She went undercover as an employee of Domiciliary Care and unsurprisingly, did not state on her CV that she was a journalist. Last week she was arrested for providing false personal details. The NUJ are backing her and so are the BBC, but she is part of a growing trend of the persecution of whistleblowers in the area of elderly care. Remember Margaret Haywood? She was the nurse that filmed undercover for Panorama in an elderly ward to expose the abuse going on. She was struck off the nursing register for filming patients without their permission. The fact that she asked their permission to show the footage before it was broadcast cut no ice with the nursing board; she was sacked and without registration she will not be able to work in nursing again. Then there was Dr Rita Pal, who exposed abuse going on in an elderly hospital ward in North Staffordshire NHS trust. Her reward for that was ten years of persecution through the courts of the GMC. It's still not over and she is now working as a GP.

One could laugh at the sheer pettiness of the rage of these jobsworths. I laughed out loud when Arifa Farooq revealed that 'Lady' Mary Beattie who is the head of Domiciliary Care is in fact nothing of the sort; Burke's Peerage had no record of her honorific title. (I also thought Farooq would pay for putting in that detail and I wasn't wrong.) At the same time the sheer violence of the reaction to anyone exposing the faults in elderly care is disturbing. It is par for the course for jobsworths to try and trip up whistleblowers; it is not usual for them to succeed, as they did with Margaret Haywood and Rita Pal. I am keeping my fingers crossed for Arifa Farooq and I am hoping the fact that she is a journalist rather than a medic will protect her. In the meantime, it's a rough old world out there for whistleblowers,but we need them. It's time we gave them proper protection.