Its staffed with minimum wage workers who are in perilous conditions, with no support, time or backup. They are cleaning shit a piss all day long, and being shouted at for being foreign by the demented.
At a certain point, you fire so many there aren't any left in the area. I moved my relative to another area for unrelated reasons, but it was the same story at the new place too.
There were a few really good ones tbh, but 95% were in private care because nobody else would hire them.
First, the PAs from the agency who employed them did a better job than we could have. Most of them were current nurses picking up extra money or former nurses who had retired from active work. Save for one who was new to the job and clearly in over her head (and removed from the account after one short shift), they were all competent and conscientious caregivers, if maybe struggling personally one way or another. Not a job anyone chooses to do, I suspect, but one they're often driven to by circumstance.
Second, that kind of care is prohibitively expensive long-term. The memory care facility costs 25% to 30% of the in-home care, and is far safer. We got lucky and had access to a smaller facility with a very low resident-to-staff ratio.
In the US, at least, I don't see the prospects for this kind of care getting anything but worse. I worry that once the Baby Boomer volume of elders passes through the system, the capital that has swallowed so much of elder care up will pull out and a lot of it will collapse and what survives won't be particularly good or affordable, even compared to current levels.
The solution is to pay these positions well enough to attract people who genuinely believe in the profession. But society optimises away from doing that because there's no obvious ROI outside of making running costs cheaper.
So we'll get the robots instead and the cries in response to the horrors of malfunction, will not be heard because the victims are politically weak. I only hope we never do this in education.
I am noting that the current system is dystopian, and pointed out the causes for those dystopian.
I would have hoped that the implication is obvious: the system is at fault.
In the UK at least, I reject that homes are run like prisons, mainly because prisons here have much less staff and a lower standard of cleanliness. We also don't (yet) have private prisons.
"solving" adult social care is a big issue that can't be solved by staffing alone.
Robots might make it a little less terrible.
But, given the deficiency of the UK to actually grasp the nettle of adult social care, this is probably what we'll get.
A better way, perhaps is better integration of care in the community, as in old people mixed in and around young. (safeguarding issue need to be solved though)