The carer who was a fake
This Is Why
Sky News
4.0 • 552 Ratings
🗓️ 21 November 2024
⏱️ 24 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
When Sarah Whitaker hired a live-in carer for her 89-year-old father, she thought she was securing a lifeline. What she got was a stranger who could not cook, drive, and care – because she wasn’t the carer Sarah had booked.
This bizarre and troubling story takes us deep into the cracks of Britain’s care industry, where an unregulated system leaves families vulnerable to shocking deceptions.
Sky’s Nick Martin investigates how one family was duped out of £2,000, how they found out, and what it says about the future of "home-first" care in the UK.
He joins host Niall Paterson alongside Tim Wilson, board member of the Home Care Association and managing director of Assist Care Group, a regulated home care agency, to discuss what the industry needs to do to improve.
Producer: Soila Apparicio
Additional research: Fiona Mackie
Editor: Philly Beaumont
Transcript
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| 0:56.7 | Legacy to find out how. I'm Neil Patterson on today's edition of the Sky News Daily. I was a bit shocked |
| 1:04.2 | to learn what I did. It was all rather frightening. What do we know about her? She had no training. |
| 1:11.5 | She could have doubled your pills and killed you. |
| 1:13.9 | It just staggers me that the police aren't interested. |
| 1:16.3 | Because of that, she thinks she's got away with it. |
| 1:19.3 | It's a situation that many of us will face at some point in our life. |
| 1:23.5 | Your loved one is poorly. |
| 1:25.0 | They need almost round-the-clock care whilst living at home. Multiple |
| 1:28.5 | medications need to be given and they often require help with deeply personal, often vulnerable |
| 1:34.0 | tasks. So you hire a carer, someone with the pedigree, the CV, the experience to help offer |
| 1:40.3 | your loved one actual quality of life. But what happens when that person isn't who they say they are? |
| 1:48.1 | Did you think that you would get away with it? No one would notice. Yeah. And what do you have to say to |
| 1:54.7 | David's family? I'm so sorry that has happened to them, which has never happened before. |
| 2:01.0 | I'm joined by our people in politics correspondent Nick Martin. |
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