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In care homes, sexuality and relationships are now something that the Care Quality Commission watchdog is taking into account. This is a radical change from previous years and while many people are pleased, others find it a difficult change. In a 2010 study done by the prestigious Royal College of Nursing, the researchers found out that very few care associates felt prepared to handle sexuality and relationships in the elderly residents. Most care facilities don’t mention these subjects to their employees and do nothing to facilitate any of these interactions. In fact, most nursing care home facilities do not provide double beds for patients, in case of an intimate encounter. This is after a study by the University of Manchester found 54% of men and 31% of women over the age of 70 were still sexually active. The CQC notes that a lot of care homes see the older generation in nursing homes as mentally and often physically incapable of self-care and therefore unlikely to engage in relationships. However, data from the Royal College of Nursing’s “Persistent Challenges to Providing Quality Care” report shows that most respondents were in a registered nursing home for, simply, old age. The second highest registration was dementia. The health watchdog is starting to pay more attention after a series of unfortunate instances of mistreatment to residents came to light when relatives placed hidden cameras in the resident’s room to make sure they were getting quality care. Unfortunately, the Care Quality Commission has been having trouble in recent years with personally inspecting individual facilities and tends to go the route of desk inspections, meaning that they inspect the facilities with a phone call and a list of boxes to check rather than seeing the level of care face to face. This means that even though sexuality and relationships are now something that the Care Quality Commission watchdog is watching, they might not be watching enough. This is also why the CQC has released information on how to covertly film the goings on at the facility. The hope is that with this information out there, care homes will step up their game and work on delivering quality care. In their annual quality report for 2014, the CQC mentioned that they have noticed “too much variation in people’s access, experience and outcomes” on the grounds of things such as disability, age, sexuality, and relationships. The CQC released five objectives in regards to the equality of care in homes for the elderly. Objective one is to get rid of the unconscious bias that often pervades the ideas of staff, hopefully by 2016. Objective two is to implement racial equality as per the NHS Workforce Race Equality Standard. Objective three is to work on their regulatory ability as it pertains to care for the mentally ill’s quality and security. The fourth objective is to help inspectors make judgments on the quality of care home bath for all LGB residents with regards to those bounds of sexuality. Lastly, objective five involves making sure all staff or recruits are not discriminated against for race, religion, sexuality, gender, gender reassignment, age, or disability.
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