Ark Home Healthcare Leeds

Most of the Carer's are nice and friendy, very chatty and do a good job. Some are exceptional. The odd one or two haven't a clue, but most are very good. However, the office staff who organise everything seem to mess up a lot. Careers get chopped and changed around all the time. New people keep turning up who don't know what to do or what the care plan is. Even the careers have said the office staff have a mind of their own and don't know what they are doing. It can't be easy for the careers to keep being sent to new random ad hoc clients when they don't know what their needs are. At times new people come and they don't get info about where the key safe is, or that they must use the key safe to get in. In my relatives case who has mobility problems and is a falls risk, there has been a few occasions when the careers have knocked on the door instead of getting the key to let themselves in. On two occasions recently having got no answer at the door, they rang the home phone number, my relative can't hear well on the phone so never answers it. The only reason there is a landline phone at all is because of the care alarm system. The careers should have my contact number as the first point of contact. I'm not sure if they do or don't. I've told them my number often enough but this information never seems to reach the careers during their visits. On time the person didn't even have the key safe number at all. Fortunately it was one of the occasional days I was there. I asked how they would have got in if I hadn't been there? They said they would have tried to contact one of the later careers to see if they knew the key safe number. It was also on a weekend so with the office shut and the out of hours line neither use or ornament, God knows how they were expected to get in the house. . I'm not sure how it works they seem to have hand sets which should have all the relevant details on, seemingly the careers don't get all the information they need when they go to a house. The times are all over the place, you never know from one day to the next when they will turn up, for example the morning call might be 8am, it might be 10am. The careers say they just come at the times the office give them on their hand sets. Their out of hours number is atrocious, I have rang it twice, I'm not sure where it is, maybe somewhere in the Midlands? But each time I was told they don't have any records for the Leeds clients. Yet if you ring the Leeds office, you get diverted to this out of hours number. The only reason I have given it 3 stars is because the careers are very good so they pulled the rating up. If it wasn't for them the rating would have been 1 star. If the office and the way everything is organised gets sorted out, it could be very good but several months down the line, I'm not holding my breathe.
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