The certificate says yes. Can they actually do it?

Every document a carer can show you answers the same question: has this person been cleared? None of them answers the one that keeps your mother safe, which is whether this person can do the specific thing she needs, in her house, with her equipment, at four in the morning. The families who avoid the worst outcomes ask that second question out loud, in ordinary words, and are often treated as difficult for it.

Private Carers – The Definitive Guide (Updated for 2024)

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The gap between cleared and competent

A criminal record check tells you what somebody has been convicted of. It does not tell you whether they can work your ceiling hoist. A moving and handling certificate tells you a person sat through a course, usually with a different model of hoist and a colleague standing in for the person being lifted.

That gap is the whole distance between a folder of paperwork and a real morning routine, and it catches out good carers as often as careless ones.

PrimeCarers checks carers’ identity, right to work and DBS documents, and carers complete our onboarding. References are optional rather than required, which surprises some families. Work booked through PrimeCarers is covered by PrimeCarers’ insurance, while work arranged privately outside the platform is not, so a carer needs their own public liability cover for that.

PrimeCarers is an introductory platform and does not provide, manage, supervise or clinically assess care. Clients remain responsible for checking carer documentation, interviewing carers, checking suitability for their specific needs, and agreeing the scope of care directly with the carer.

A woman enquiring for a friend put her worry to us plainly: “You’ve just got their word for it.” She was right that documents have limits. The answer is not to distrust everybody, but to ask the questions paperwork cannot answer, about tasks rather than qualifications.

Four failures, and the question that would have caught each one

These are things families and clients have described to us this year. Not one involved a carer with missing documents. Every one was a mismatch between a claim and a task.

The hoist

A daughter arranging round the clock dementia care for her mother from a long way away took on a carer who said he could work the hoist on his own. He had, as she put it, “all the certificates, all up to date”. He could not do it safely, and the placement ended badly. She had asked whether he was trained. She had not asked him to describe the transfer.

The question that catches it: “Talk me through moving her from the bed to the chair. We have a ceiling track hoist and a full body sling. Who else is in the room? What do you check before you take her weight?” Somebody who has done it answers in specifics and asks you questions back. Somebody who has not answers in adjectives. Our guide to moving and handling in private homes is written for carers, and worth reading yourself.

The seizure

A woman living with several conditions told her coordinator, still shaken hours afterwards, that a carer who had said at interview that she knew how to handle seizures froze when one actually happened. “When I had a seizure, she did not know what she was doing.” The client got through it by ringing a friend on speed dial. The claim was probably made in good faith. It had simply never been tested.

The question that catches it: “Tell me about the last time somebody you cared for had a seizure. What did you do in the first minute, and afterwards? At what point would you call 999?” Past tense questions are much harder to bluff than future tense ones.

The catheter

A man who lives alone with a live-in carer rang us after a night with no sleep at all, because his temporary carer could not manage his catheter competently and he had spent the small hours trying to sort it himself. “I haven’t had an hour’s sleep,” he said. What upset him was not the inconvenience. It was the indignity, and the thought of it happening again with the next carer.

The question that catches it: “I have an indwelling catheter. Describe your routine for the day bag and the night bag. What would you do if it stopped draining? Have you done this daily for somebody, or occasionally?” Daily is a different skill from occasionally. Your district nurse is the right person to say what a carer can safely be asked to do here, and what should stay with the nursing team.

The feeding tube

A wife caring for her husband, who takes his medication through a stomach feeding tube, hired a carer who then told her he was not allowed to give it. “I said he could be trained,” she told us, “but he said no, he’s not allowed to.” She was left with a carer who could not do the one thing she most needed. In practice this is often something a willing carer can be shown how to do by the community nursing team, but willingness is a separate question from ability.

The question that catches it: “Are you able to do this, and are you willing to do it? If you have not done it before, would you let the nurse show you?” A carer who says no here is not a bad carer. They are telling you something useful before you book them rather than after.

Ask in ordinary words, not in the trade’s

There is a trap on the other side of this. A woman living independently, with good reason to be careful about who handles her, described a promising screening call that collapsed because she asked about a moving and handling qualification by its formal name. The carer did not recognise the term and ended the call. She was not showing off. She needs precise answers before she lets a stranger take her weight.

The fix is not to lower your standards. It is to describe the task instead of naming the certificate. Asking whether somebody holds a particular advanced handling award gets you a yes, a no, or a hang up. Saying “I am a larger person and I need help transferring, so tell me how you have done that before and what equipment you used” gets you the truth.

Course names vary between training providers. The task does not. Describe the person, the equipment, the room and the time of day, and let the carer say honestly whether that is a morning they can do.

The families who ask the most questions are not the difficult ones

Clients who ask detailed questions about physical handling get read as fussy or hard to please. Almost always they are the ones already hurt, or nearly hurt, by somebody who said yes when the honest answer was “I have not done that before”.

Being on the receiving end of care is exposing. As one client said to us, being disabled is not easy, and you still have to pay the bills and live in hope. Asking a stranger to show they can move your body is not rudeness. It is the floor.

Experienced carers prefer it, because a family who has spelled out the tasks will not spring three new ones on them in week two. It starts before the interview: the way a job advert is written decides who applies, and one that names the hoist and the transfers filters your shortlist before you speak to anybody.

Some skills only transfer in person

During one live-in changeover, the outgoing carer spent most of a long call explaining, in painstaking physical detail, how to work a ceiling hoist and how to turn the person she cared for without causing injury or infection when changing pads. “If you don’t use your own power to do it, it will not work,” she said. Then she asked to stay an extra afternoon to show the incoming carer face to face, because words alone would not do it. She was right.

Two things follow. If the care involves a hoist, a sliding board, a catheter or a feeding tube, budget for an overlap and pay both carers for the handover hours: a few hours of double cost is nothing against the cost of it going wrong. And it is the strongest argument for continuity: every change of carer means the skill has to be transferred again.

Write it down as well as showing it. A care plan you build with your carer that records the sling size, which side the bed is approached from and the phrase that settles your mother is worth more than anything in the folder.

What the certificate was never going to cover

Some of the biggest failures have nothing to do with skill at all.

• Distance. A carer who lives an hour away in good traffic is a carer who will eventually not arrive. One daughter spent months cycling through people who lived too far out to be reliable. The geography of the carer shortage is unforgiving, and better planned around than hoped away.
• Driving. A client in a rural area with no shops or surgery within walking distance told us bluntly: “The idea of having a carer is to have a car.” A superbly qualified applicant who does not drive is the wrong applicant there. If they will be driving your relative, ask about their car insurance: carrying a client is not ordinary social use, and charging for mileage is different again.
• Being understood. If instructions cannot be given and received clearly, every other skill is unusable. Test that on a real task, not in a friendly chat.
• Rest. A live-in carer told us she went nearly three weeks without proper sleep after a client came home from hospital needing constant attention overnight. Competence does not survive that. If the nights are broken, fix the rota before you question the skills.

PrimeCarers is an introductory platform and does not provide, manage, supervise or clinically assess care. Clients remain responsible for checking carer documentation, interviewing carers, checking suitability for their specific needs, and agreeing the scope of care directly with the carer.

What to do next

1. Write the tasks down first. Name the equipment, the transfers, the times of day and the parts that go wrong. Then post the job with that detail in it, rather than a description of a lovely person.
2. Interview in the past tense. Ask people to describe, not to confirm. Our guide to interviewing private carers covers the wider ground; add two or three task-level questions of your own.
3. Watch the first transfer. A paid trial visit with you in the room tells you in ten minutes what an hour on the phone cannot. There is more on what a good trial looks like, including how to end one kindly.
4. Pay for an overlap. Book the outgoing carer, or yourself, alongside the new one for a few hours, and spend that time on the hoist and the personal care rather than on the kettle.
5. Ask the nurse or GP what a willing carer can be taught. Treat “I have not done that, but I would learn” as one of the better answers you will hear.

Related reading

• Meeting a carer: what a good trial looks like, and what a bad one costs
• Cameras, cash and trust: keeping a parent safe with a private carer
• How to check a private carer, step by step
• Carer interview: what to ask and what to check
• Finding a carer who drives