Safe Guardin or POVA?

P.O.V.A

As many of you know I (like many others) support people with moderate and severe learning disabilities.  Being a support worker you have to go on different types of training like many other jobs, working for Services in care you have to go on Mandatory training and POVA is one of them. 

POVA stands for Protection over Vulnerable Adults now this is also classed as Safe Guarding. As part of the Care Quality Commission and the Care code of Practice it states that all Vulnerable should be protected and each support worker will act as an advocate for the said individual. This means that the support worker will be there to act in the individual’s best interest and support their decisions.

Now POVA is separated in to different categories and one of the categories is abuse. This is then separated in to even more categories IE Institutional Abuse, direct abuse, unintentional abuse ETC. Some of these you don’t actually realise you do to your own family every day!

Now back in the days before the government started the gravy train of care in the community there were lots of institutes around the country such as Caulderstones and Winick. Now hospitals would refer someone who was “not normal” IE someone with physical/ learning disability or if you were a single parent to somewhere like Caulderstones. These places were big hospitals out in the countryside with 40- 50 bed wards. Now these places were not like the priory or anywhere nice and posh these were terrible, I think the best way to describe it one flew over the cuckoo’s nest. These places use to harbour tonnes of institutional abuse 10 or 20 people would share the same bath and water. Meal times weren’t much better either you were given 20 minutes to eat breakfast, lunch and tea if you didn’t eat in the allotted 20 minutes your food was taken off you. Some people who had cerebral palsy had arms broken by nurses fighting to get jumpers or t-shirts on them, people who bit themselves or others had all their teeth removed.  When Thatcher was in power one of her “good choices” was to start care in the community giving people with disabilities the chance to live a normal life out in the community. As this started to take over more and more companies were popping up enabling this positive outlook on life.  More people were given the opportunity to get discharged and move in to local communities. Some of the now elderly residents at houses were not too sure about the move as they had never been out of the institutes or had the opportunity to draw their own money from the bank or get the chance to go to the post office to send letters to friends or pick up the phone and speak to family.

Now the government are looking at different ways to protect these people hence: POVA, The Mental Health ACT.

Let’s take Institutional abuse I can be so simple as “Chippy Tea” on a Friday or Sunday Dinner.  Do you remember when you were younger and your mum use to make you have a bath on a Sunday whether you needed it or not!  Now institutional abuse basically is something you do and is a routine that isn’t changed. You can class this at work when you have a rota if you have a shift pattern that is also institutional abuse!

Unintentional Abuse: The best way to explain this is when say you have had a bad day at work and you come home an something is really bugging you and you have a rant at someone or you shout at someone for no reason that can be classed as Unintentional Abuse. 

Now as you can see there are so many types of abuse and some of is so trivial? Did you think you was abusing somebody??