About Angela Sherman
Angela Sherman, founder of Care To Be Different, acts as an advocate for families who are trying to make sense of the elderly care system.
Her own personal experience of the care system includes challenging the NHS about care fees – and winning free Fully-Funded NHS Care for both of her parents while they were in a care home. This funding is called NHS Continuing Healthcare.
Based in Buckinghamshire, Angela is just one of relatively few people to have challenged the NHS twice on its decisions to force both of her parents to pay for nursing care.
She now helps other elderly people win NHS Continuing Care.
With clients who continue to follow her advice throughout, she has a 100% success rate.
Reversing NHS care funding decisions
When her own parents were in care Angela won Continuing Care twice – first for her mother, then a second time for her father.
It meant the NHS was forced to refund her parents over £105,000 in illegal care fees and pay all care fees from that point onwards.
It took three and a half years, and she pursued the two cases through in-depth research from scratch and dogged determination – and yet without having to spend tens of thousands of pounds on legal fees.
She’s done it and won it. Now she shows you how to do the same – and faster.
Angela is not a lawyer. She’s a daughter who cared passionately about her parents’ welfare. They both had Parkinson’s Disease and dementia. Her mother also had heart disease and several strokes, and towards the end of his life her father developed cancer. They both went into full-time care on the same day in spring 2005, and they both died within a few weeks of each other at the end of 2009.
Using her personal experience fighting her parents’ corner, she now helps other families navigate the complexities of the elderly care ‘system’ in the UK – and helps prevent other families having to go through the care funding ordeal she and her family went through.
Watch her TV interview about NHS Continuing Healthcare: ‘On The Edge’ on our YouTube channel.
Alternatively, read the interview transcript.
Challenging illegal NHS care funding actions
Angela Sherman adds:
“Today I have the peace of mind that I fought hard for my parents while they were in care – protecting their financial interests and also doing what I could to make sure they received the care they were entitled to. But it wasn’t always that way.
“When my parents first went into care I knew nothing about the care system – and I found that very few people in ‘authority’ were willing to help me.
“It’s hard having a parent in a care home. It’s even harder having two parents in care at the same time, especially when both are very disabled. And it’s harder still when you don’t understand the system and yet you’re faced with the exhausting battle of forcing the NHS to step up to its legal duty.
“Every time I found myself having to describe my parents’ state of health to people from the NHS, whose main aim seemed to be to obstruct the funding process and deny care, my heart would break a little bit more.
“I realised my parents were at the hands of an NHS and a national ‘care’ system that seems to care very little for elderly people. I also experienced first hand the gap between how things should work in theory and what actually happens in practice.
“It felt like a very long battle – and if back then I’d had all the knowledge I have now, it would have been so much easier.
“My elation at finally securing free NHS Continuing Healthcare funding for my parents is mixed with immense anger at the ridiculous hoops I had to jump through to access care – and to counter the illegal decisions made by the NHS in denying care that should have been provided free of charge all along.”
Illegal asset stripping
She continues:
“Incorrect care funding decisions are often imposed on elderly people in care, and yet there is often no one in any statutory authority willing to help people challenge such decisions.
“As happened with my own parents, the wrong decisions as a result of a flawed and illegal process led to them having to sell their home to pay for care – until I challenged the NHS and won a refund of care fees for them.
“I blogged about my experiences at the time, and then I decided to set up Care To Be Different – to share the knowledge and insider insights I’d gained – to help other families through the process and to raise greater awareness of the extent of financial abuse and blatant age discrimination in our woefully inadequate care system.
“If I’d had someone to guide me through the process back then – and show me what really happens, not just what’s supposed to happen – I would have saved so much time and stress.
“Elderly people in care homes have a right to receive state-funded NHS care for health needs through taxation just as much as any other person, whatever their age or circumstances.
“One of my favourite quotes is from Mahatma Gandhi: “First they ignore you. Then they laugh at you. Then they fight you. Finally you win.”
“For me it sums up perfectly what elderly people and their families often face when pursuing the funding and the care that is rightfully theirs. And, more importantly, it reminds me how the injustices of the system can be exposed and overturned.”
Read the nuts and bolts of Angela’s mother’s care case and her father’s care case for NHS Continuing Healthcare funding.
