A GULWORTHY man who battled for over a year to secure home care for his late wife is calling for more help for unpaid carers looking after loved ones at home.

Joe Smith was the the main carer for his wife Carol after she was diagnosed with vascular dementia in 2023.

Her condition has gradually deteriorated and she became bedridden. She died on May 26 this year.

Joe was happy with the care she received in her last weeks, from carers from St Luke’s Hospice.

However, before that, he battled to secure good local authority-funded care for her at home.

Joe dates the sharp decline in Carol to a three-month stay in hospital in the spring of 2024, which went on for much longer than expected.

He was determined to get her out of hospital. “I had a hell of a job to get her out,” he said. However, once she was home, he had a new battle, to care for her on his own.

Joe himself is not young and has back problems. He needed help to be able to wash Carol in bed, feed her, make meals, do the washing and physically lift his wife.

When Carol first came out of hospital in March 2024, the ‘rapid response’ team from the NHS’s LiveWell team would come twice a day to lift, wash her and change continence pads. When this help finished after ten weeks, Joe was on his own.

He did not realise that help was available until Devon County Council’s social services department made contact with him in December 2024.

“Social services had turned up in mid-December 2024 and said we have come to do a referral from the hospital, to check that everything is going ok,” said Joe. “I said, she came out of hospital at the beginning of the year, shouldn’t this have happened sooner? I had been doing it on my own all this time.”

The county council’s social services team then did an assessment which decided that Joe needed two carers for Carol three times a day – first thing in the morning, at lunchtime and in the early evening.

The county council hired a care company, Engima, based in North Somerset, but they were only able to send one carer.

“We went through March and through April with only one carer,” said Joe.

“A chap from social services then rang up and said we are having difficulties, we will have to change the visits to twice a day, once at 10am and 6pm. I said ‘you can’t leave her in soiled clothes from 10am to 6pm at night. I gave them hell on the phone. Angry isn’t the word for it’.”

Joe said: “It got to the point where it is too late for us, but I want to flag up the difficulty we have found. No one tells you anything, you don’t get any information. You don’t know who to contact.”

He asks why a home care company Enigma, based near Bristol, was given the contract to provide their care, rather than a home care company from the Tavistock area.

“Everyone is saying that the standard of care for people in this situation is really bad. We know there is a shortage of carers. The two lads who came here, they are basically on the minimum wage and they don’t get paid between visits. One of the lads who came here said people it is quite normal to put in a 14-hour day and only get paid for five,” he said.

“The problem with the council is they go for the cheapest bidder.”

Joe went onto stress that he had had excellent help from the district nursing team “without them we would have been left without proper support” and also, in Carol’s final weeks, from the care team at St Luke’s Hospice – “marvellous people, we can't thank them enough for what they did”.