Where it all went wrong.

Outsourcing seems a benign phrase. It means that having won a contract you subcontract the work to others.
The structure of securing a contract and here we often mean the running of what used to be an arm of government in providing services to the public, services which used to be directly the responsibility of a Whitehall department and therefore the responsibility of a government minister who themselves are responsible to Parliament. By outsourcing the work to theoretically large companies, it begins to water down and disseminate the chain of responsibility. When things go wrong, the phrase "not on my watch gov" comes to mind since the dissemination does not stop with the company securing the contract. Having secured the work, the work is then sub contracted to other smaller companies who then further subcontract the work until responsibility is lost totally. The people suffering of course are the ones expecting some level of service and often they are the most disadvantaged in society.
My Home Care a company who do what it says on the tin, they visit people in their home to help usually the old and disabled in their home are being questioned for a number of cases which are just now being brought to our notice.
The root problem seems to be the age old one of profit.
The people at the top of the main organisation set the standards and the schedules their aim is to get the best use of the labour under their control and so maximise the unit cost of each social service visit.
By employing people below the minimum wage, not paying them whilst they move from one client to another, insisting that the time spent in the individuals home is strictly limited, irrespective of the needs of the person being visited, all this panders to the need to streamline the service to make it profitable. The stories of feeding the person whilst they were using the toilet, the horrible image of being told "not to help someone" who they discover has fallen and injured themselves, rather that they call an ambulance (nothing wrong with that) but then leave to go to the next job with the only caveat that they leave the door open so the injured person on the floor could be seen by the ambulance crew when they arrived.
Where is the humanity in this, where is the decency, where is the respect we should all have for one another ?
Well by the very act of "privatising" what was before a social service which we, as the general public, thought could be entrusted to the Government we elect, privatising the work involves evaluating each call from a monetary point of view and eliciting a profit from what was initially a civilised humanitarian service which the "strong" offer the "weak" in our society. Paring the time down to the bone like some "time and motion" function in a factory goes against the very ethos of of this type of work and also who we should be and how we prioritise ourselves as a caring society.
As we plough on becoming more and more like America one can hear the call, "please enter your PIN number" ringing down the hall as the dementia enfeebled oldie wonders where it all went wrong ?