CHC assessment !

So eventually an assessment was arranged for my mum, there was very little flexibility in when they were prepared to come out so I had to again take some time out of work to make sure I was at the assessment. When I arrived at the assessment I was a bit surprised ( understatement ) to find that the nurse from CHC had already done all her assessment before my arrival, that wasn't how I expected the assessment to be carried out and I was interested to hear her thoughts on things. This was the most shocking bit for me - she felt mum was actually better than last year when she assessed her and didn't feel mum's case required any further input ! I was stunned and for a few minutes I felt like I had been winded, I couldn't believe her conclusions and I just didn't know what to say. This wasn't happening and I wasn't going to accept what she was saying to me as I really didn't agree with her, we discussed things and she admitted that she was using Mums notes as evidence even though she was aware they were often inaccurate and not a true reflection - WHAT !!! that's not acceptable if you know your evidence may be flawed you can't rely on it , she wasn't even going to ask for my feelings or thoughts about my Mum , she was just going on evidence she knew to be flawed !! how could this be a thorough and fair assessment ? Mum had a pressure sore at the time of the assessment but she wasn't even going to evidence that as she said an entry in the notes a few days prior had eluded to this improving - she wasn't going to follow up on this at all and this is one of the indicators on the assessment tool. The more I spoke to her the more I could see the purpose of her role was to keep a tight grip on this public money , she even said to me at one point " this is hard earned tax payers money we are dealing with ! " - I was aware of that and I felt her comment was inappropriate and gave an insight into how she percived her role. I was trying to get something for nothing I was trying to get my mum something she deserved and was entitled to, I am not a free loader and neither is my mum and her implications were very hurtful. Unfortunately her comment had made me even more determined to challenge her position and despite her best efforts to make me roll over it was now not going to happen.
I arrived back at work shell shocked and couldn't begin to explain how the meeting had gone to my colleague. I was stunned by the assessors attitude and negativity. I had asked her to clarify several areas of her scoring and I expected her to provide more evidence to back up her findings if she felt they were right. That night I wrote to the chair of the CHC to explain my lack of confidence in the process of assessment that had taken place and to make them aware of my unhappiness before the assessor had time to compile her report , I didn't want then to conclude things after such a sketchy brief assessment and I was going to make sure they didn't just rely on the limited evidence they had. This obviously wasn't going to be an easy process , challenging then isn't what most people do but I wasn't most people and I was becoming more and more determined to get Mum recognised in her struggle.
The assessment disregarded many elements of mums condition as they were deemed part of the disease process , this wouldn't happen with any other chronic condition but it suits the assessment purpose when dealing with dementia to just label things such as withdrawal , being quite or depressed as the disease process without actually gaining evidence to support it. The assessor got Mum to smile so felt mum wasn't suffering from any low mood or depression even though she had lost her husband and was trapped in this horrible illness. That was such a tenuous shallow way of evaluating someone I cannot believe it could stand up to any scrutiny. My complaints detailed fully all the areas of the assessment I was unhappy with and the areas that I wanted assessing further, I was not going to wait for the assessor to draw her conclusions I was making it known immediately that I wasn't happy with the way things had been carried out. I received a reply to my letter stating that my concerns would be looked into and that the further evidence I was requesting would be sought. They also acknowledged several key points about Mums condition that had not even been touched on in the assessment , some of these were significant and of critical value to Mum's case. It was agreed that once the further evidence had been sought the assessor , the chair of CHC and myself would meet again to discuss the case further. I took the chance at this point to also indicate that the pressure ulcer the assessor had felt was not worthy of mentioning was still present and actually not improving as the paperwork suggested , this just added weight to my argument that the assessment had been sketchy and not robust , this may be ok for some people but it wasn't going to be ok with me. Just writing the complaint and detailing my concerns about the assessment helped me to see that I was right , Mum was being treated unfairly by the process and with the detail and evidence I provided it was going to be hard to disregard many issues that the assessor hadn't felt needed to be mentioned but were actually of major importance to how Mum's dementia was impacting on her life.
Standing firm with the assessor had been a hard and demeaning process , she made her comment to me about tax payers money and then even asked if I was an only child, I am , she then said "so the money your Mum pays at present would go to you then if she is awarded funding ?"- this was an attempt to make me feel bad about challenging her but It didn't it just made me more determined to fight for what my Mum deserved, money wasn't the issue , the issue was that because dementia often robs people of their basic instincts and communication processes then its easy to make assumptions about them , the assessor was making many assumptions using what she knew to be flawed evidence. She spent around 10 minutes with my mum and was happy to draw multiple conclusions based up on this , but she wasn't prepared to listen to me or the nursing staff , we are the people who deal with mum day on day , I am the person who knows her best , I am the person who sees how she has declined as she fights this awful illness and it is truly negligent not to take our views and evidence into account when dealing with such complex matters. Knowing that more was now being done and that I was pushing for mum to be assessed properly made me feel slightly better about the process. no time scale was set with regard to meeting the CHC team again as it wasn't possible to put a deadline on the evidence gathering and I was happy to let this take its course, I had nothing to loose now I had made my position clear and I could wait it out , the more evidence that was gathered the more it would strengthen mums case and this was all I could hope for.