To all appearances, it was an ordinary digital alarm clock. Except that it wasn’t. It was a high-resolution, 30-frame remote video surveillance clock purchased for £20 on eBay, and I had bought it for one specific purpose: to record 24 hours in the life of my elderly mother at her North London care home.
My mother had been a resident at Ash Court, a 62-bedroom private care home in Kentish Town, for almost a year.
But I wanted to understand why she wasn’t sleeping, talking or feeding herself any more. She looked so sad, so introverted.
The care workers at Ash Court were always quick to reassure me: ‘Stop worrying. Your mother is fine . . .’
But I wasn’t satisfied.
Why did fingermarks keep appearing on her upper arms? Why had she started moaning ‘oh God, oh God’ when care workers came into the room?
I got my answer — courtesy of the secret camera hidden in that clock. But it was an answer so painful, so unexpected, that it will for ever scar my family.
After just two nights of filming, I found out that the bruising didn’t come from aspirin, as the home’s staff and the home’s doctor had assured me.
It came from abuse.
Suspicions: Jane Worroll decided to investigate why her elderly mother Maria was having trouble sleeping while a residents at the Ash Court Care Home in Kentish Town, North London
During those two nights, the camera captured footage of five carers visiting my mother. Their job was to prepare her for sleep and tend to her personal needs.
They did get her into bed. And they did wash her. But she was also slapped repeatedly, man-handled, verbally abused and jeered at.
One of the carers, Jonathan Aquino, 30, has just been jailed for 18 months for what he did to my mother.
The other four carers — all women — have been sacked.
The footage has now been turned into a film investigating the threatening world of Britain’s elderly care homes, showing tonight on BBC’s Panorama.
Until my mother lost the capacity to walk, I’d always been one of those daughters who said: ‘I’ll never put my mother into a care home.’
But in March 2010, I found myself in a position where I had to. My 78-year-old mother, Maria Worroll, had been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s and had suffered several falls. She couldn’t get out of bed and ended up in hospital. The hospital and social services said she now needed full-time nursing care.
Until that point, I’d tended to her everyday needs — bathing and dressing and cooking for her. But now I was pregnant, still working and increasingly unable to manage. My siblings and I made a family decision to find a care home for our mother to live in.
When I first started looking, I imagined a home that was warm and homely, with highly trained, welcoming staff. I was naive. I visited many homes in North London.
