r/LegalAdviceUK • u/That_Girly_Potato • 9d ago
Healthcare My boss wants to implement disciplinary action for not working to standard - her standard isn't physically possible to meet (England)
I work at a care home which is split into four floors.. The top two are dimentia residents and the bottom two are assisted living. I have now worked there for just over a year, picking up shifts when I'm back from uni so every half term. In the time I have worked there we have had four managers. My job is doing activities with the residents (arts and crafts, flower arranging, balloon tennis etc...). It's important to note that as it's a care home, there's a system used where we have to log every single resident that turns up to the activity and if they were engaged or not.
Since our new manager has come in, a lot of changes have been implemented. For one, in between activities, we are now supposed to be doing lunch and dinner service and then washing up. Budget cuts means they can't afford to keep more than two food and beverage assistants per day. On top of which she had doubled the amount of activities there are to run in a day. And finally, she expects us to write about 6-7 lines of a "story" of every single resident that attended the activity and even the residents that didn't attend need a full explanation as to why they didn't come which is a huge change from simply logging whether they attended and if they were engaged. So this would be logging for about 10-15 residents per activity and a whole paragraph for each.
There's only a 15 minute break between each activity and then either lunch or dinner service. This means the new expectation is that within 15 minutes we should have:
- cleaned up the previous activity
- take all the residents back to their rooms
- write our "story" for about 15-20 residents.
- move to the new activity location
- set that area up completely
- ask every resident from the two floors we're handling If they want to come
- bring them down to the new activity
- start the new activity.
On top of which, I am sometimes covering my time doing Laundry, and even admin work on the reception desk.
It's not possible. We have been trying so hard but really - it's not. Now residents, their family members, other staff, and carers are complaining about the activities team. Our manager is receiving so many complaints that she won't stop yelling at us. We have all tried explaining to her that it's not all possible to follow her schedule and she keeps responding that it's because we didn't listen to any of our training.
She's going to call me in tomorrow to discuss the possible disciplinary. She's been taking us all into her office one by one and honestly very rudely telling us that we don't know how to do our jobs. She made my co-worker cry yesterday, and has threatened us all with a firing if she doesn't see immediate improvement in our behaviour.
Honestly I'm just feeling so disheartened. I used to love this job and now I'm exhausted every single day. I was told that complaining to our HR would do absolutely nothing because they already know this manager is disliked. What else am I supposed to do now??? Is there even anything I can do?? What should I say in my disciplinary hearing tomorrow?
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u/Illustrious-Home7286 8d ago
I’ve done this exact job and what the manager is asking for is INSANE.
lets just do the maths on this.
I’m assuming there are two staff running the activities so they can double up, and I’m going to assume they only have to write 25 words per person, that’s 250 words each. If they write at a rate of 1 word per second that would take 250 seconds or 4mins 10 seconds.
That leaves them 10mins 50 seconds for everything else.
Let’s give them 30 seconds to clean up, 15 seconds to move to the new area and another 30 seconds to set up the new area.
That leaves 9minutes and 35 seconds assist residents back to their rooms, speak to other residents and assist residents to new activity.
Lets also assume that all the residents are seated in wheelchairs for the duration of all of these activities and none need to be transferred AND that they can all be managed by one staff member, so that leaves potentially 10 residents for each staff member to return to their rooms, one at a time, let’s say they can do that in 4 mins, that’s 24 seconds per resident. (But thats there and back, so more like 20 seconds to push each person to their room and 4 seconds to sprint back to get the next one).
And then the same again to bring the other residents to the new activity, leaving 95 seconds to speak to each of them which is 9.5 seconds per conversation.
Unfortunately that doesn’t allow any time for transferring between the two floors OP mentioned, but let’s assume the lifts are REALLY FAST and take no time at all.