FAQs

Once you contact us, we will arrange for a care lead to come and visit you. Your care package can start as quickly as 48 hours after your meeting with our care lead.

Once we have a care plan in place, it will detail exactly what you expect from each visit. Our carers can help around the home, deliver personal care and provide companionship. Please see our service list for full details. In short, our carers will do anything that a family member could do for you – they are not nurses and therefore can’t help with injections and sterile dressing changes. Although in general our carers will not do manual handling, dog walking, gardening or decorating, as part of our live-in service dog walking can be done by agreement and our maintenance service can help with regular jobs around the house – such as gardening and clearing the gutters – or individual jobs arising as and when.  

This will depend on the number of care visits you have on a daily and weekly basis. Carers very rarely work a shift that lasts for all your waking hours and usually our clients have more than one care worker. We do endeavour to keep the number of care workers to a minimum and if for any reason you request not to have a particular carer, we pay special attention to your wishes. Although we can’t give you just one carer, we do give you a small team of regular carers who arrive and leave on time.

We deliver home care and support in Taunton, Wellington, Bridgwater and the surrounding villages on the Devon/Somerset border. Our 24 hour live-in care service is available throughout the South West region.

Our induction takes staff to beyond the expectations of the nationally recognised standards. During  induction our staff shadow an experienced member of staff in the community – observing and being trained to deliver care with good practice. Netherclay Home Care sends staff on certificated external training courses for such topics as food hygiene, manual handling, first aid, health & safety, care of older people and medication administration. As part of our commitment to our staff’s development and your care, 60% of all care staff have achieved or are undertaking diplomas in health and social care.

We know that care needs change. Our care planning process with you is iterative – that is it changes over time depending on what you need. We offer frequent reviews of your care and of course our carers will be feeding back about the effectiveness of your care. If at any time you want to discuss a change to your care, you can do this – we are always pleased to hear from you, your immediate family or health or social workers.

We check that that our carers are staying for the correct time and doing the tasks that they are meant to in several ways. We frequently check in with our clients to ensure that they are satisfied with the service. We also employ technology to help us. We have two apps that our carers use on every visit: Nourish and Care Planner. Care Planner helps our back office staff plan a carer’s day. Care Planner also clocks the time that a carer is at a specific house. If a carer is running late or has cut a visit short, Care Planner will alert our office. It used to be that your care notes were filled in by a carer and left at a client’s house. Now with Nourish, care notes are made on smart phones and are easily viewable by our coordinators in our central office. If care tasks are not being fulfilled, it will be brought to our attention and we will pull up our carers to ask why.

We carefully vet and interview every member of our team. Before they go our to delivery care, they also undergo extensive training and are subject to an enhanced DBS (Disclosure Barring Service) check. The DBS check highlights any previous activity that would exclude people from working in the care sector. Netherclay Home Care is regulated by the Care Quality Commission (CQC) and we are rated “Good.” CQC sets out standards for how we should discharge our duty of care and the standards by which we operate. Of course, we also carry Public Liability Insurance. On top of all this, all staff wear a uniform and carry an identification card with their photo, their name and signature. 

We will send you an invoice once a month. Setting up a standing order is the easiest thing – saves you having to remember to write a cheque!

While care is expensive, home care can be the most cost-effective option. We have written a little on the cost of home care vs residential care. How much your care costs is determined on a per case basis – it very much depends on the needs of a client and the length and frequency of visits. After an assessment, we put together a detailed plan for each customer. This will show the care that will be delivered as well as a weekly breakdown of the costs. For those entitled to financial assistance, we will also factor that in.

Our office is open between 6.30am and 10.30pm. Someone is always there to let you know if your carer is held up by traffic or if you need to talk to us for any reassurance or to assit you with any emergencies in your care. Outside of these hours, we would always recommend the NHS 111 service for non-emergency health related questions.

We a local, family business who have delivered care in the South West for almost 50 years. We run three residential, nursing and dementia nursing homes and we started Netherclay Home Care in 1994. We are a local team with local knowledge and nationally recognised standards.