The home wants to put a video of Dad singing on their Facebook page. He said yes, but he says yes to everything. Does that count?

#1stillpainting62(Joined Nov 2024 · 26 posts)August 11, 2026, 7:47 pm

Different problem from last time, and in a way a nicer one, which is why I do not trust myself on it.

Somebody from the home's office filmed the Wednesday singing on her phone. Dad is front and centre doing Danny Boy, every word, eyes shut, and it is genuinely the best I have seen him look since February. The deputy manager showed it to me on Friday and then produced a form. They want it on the home's Facebook page. The form says "next of kin consent to use of image" and has a line for me to sign.

She said they asked Dad and he said yes. I believe her. He also says yes to the tea trolley, to the chiropodist, to the man who reads the meter, and to me when I ask if he has had lunch, whether or not he has. Yes is what comes out of him now.

My sister wants it up. Half of me wants it up, because people look at that home's page and think of it as somewhere sad, and it is not. The other half read the consent page on this site last month and now cannot work out whether I actually have the thing they are asking me to sign away. I am his next of kin. I am not him.

Is a yes from him enough. Is a signature from me enough. Or is the answer no and I am just the person it is easiest to get a yes from.

#2Marion K.(Joined Jul 2024 · 38 posts)August 12, 2026, 7:12 am

My mother's home did this with a photograph in the newsletter and I signed on the spot. Nothing went wrong. I would not sign now, and it is not because anything went wrong, it is because I worked out afterwards that I had been asked because I was the easy person to ask, not because I was the right one.

#3Yusuf A.(Joined Aug 2025 · 13 posts)August 12, 2026, 9:30 pm

The Wednesday woman at Dad's home, the community musician from my thread earlier this year, flatly refuses to be filmed with residents. The manager was annoyed about it in front of me once. She said, quite calmly, "my session, my rule, film the residents when I have gone if you want to have that argument with their families".

I thought at the time she was being precious. Reading this I think she had thought about it and the manager had not.

#4Miriam HalsteadModerator(Joined Mar 2024 · 208 posts)August 14, 2026, 10:26 am

I am the singalong lady at two homes, so you are asking somebody who has been on the other end of exactly that phone. I am not a lawyer and I have not met your father, so what follows is how I understand the question and what I do about it in my own sessions, not a ruling on him.

The short version first. The question is not whether he said yes. It is whether he could weigh what he was saying yes to, and those are different things. Capacity is decision specific. A man can be perfectly able to decide whether he wants to sing this afternoon and unable to decide whether a video of himself should sit on the internet indefinitely, in front of an audience he will never meet, for as long as the page exists. The first decision is about now. The second is about a future he may not be able to picture. If he cannot weigh the second one, then he cannot consent to it, and the fact that he says yes does not change that. It just tells you he is agreeable, which you already knew.

Then the form. What a next of kin signature does in that situation is make you the person who said yes, and that is what it is for. The thing it cannot do is transfer his decision to you. Relatives are exactly the right people to ask what somebody would have wanted, and a decent home should ask you that. Consenting on his behalf to publication is a different act, and it is a poor fit for any process of deciding in another person's interests, for three reasons that the consent and safeguarding page goes through properly: publication is open ended, nobody can say who will see it or for how long; it is irreversible, because a clip once shared cannot be recalled from the people and systems that have copied it; and it benefits the publisher, which means the people asking you have an interest in your answer. A home's Facebook page is marketing. It may be warm, well meant marketing, and it is still marketing.

One more distinction, and it is the one that catches homes out most often. Consent to take part is not consent to be filmed. Your father agreed to sing. He did not agree to a camera, and I would gently ask who decided to get the phone out in the first place, because in my sessions nobody does. That rule came out of a photograph a daughter took of her mother mid song, years ago, which she sent me and asked me to use anywhere I liked. I still have it and I have never used it, because the person in it could not have told me whether she wanted it on the internet, and her daughter's permission was her daughter's.

So, the practical things I would want answered before signing anything, and the answers tell you a lot about the home. Who decides about images, and is it a named person who is not the one who wants the clip. Where is the record of what each resident agreed to, and when. What happens if you say stop in a year. Will it come down, and can they tell you whether it has been shared by then. Who else is in the frame, because the two women either side of him at the table have families as well. And is there a review date, because permission given now is not permission for the website in 2029.

What I would offer instead, and what I have offered families myself: ask for the clip to be sent to you and your sister, privately, and for it to go in his file. You get to have it. He gets to be seen by the people who know him. Nobody gets to have him on a page. Arts in care homes covers what a home is actually expected to have in place around this, which is more than a form with a line on it.

And a last thing, because it is easy to hear all this as a telling off. The clip sounds lovely. Wanting it seen is not a failing. The daughter with the photograph was not wrong to want her mother seen either. She just did not have the thing she was offering me, and neither, I think, do you.

#5mikeatthepiano(Joined Feb 2025 · 19 posts)August 15, 2026, 6:05 pm

From the piano stool. Two of the homes I play at film for social media.

Home one: somebody asks the residents on the day, anyone who nods is in, it is up by teatime. Home two: families fill in a form once a year, a named manager signs off every image, and there is a standing rule that nobody who cannot decide for themselves has their face used, so what goes up is hands on a drum, the back of a chair, me at the piano. Home two's page is duller. Home two is the one I would put my own father in.

Also, and this is a small point, I am in the frame at home one too and nobody has ever asked me either. Which tells you it is not a process, it is a phone.

#6stillpainting62(Joined Nov 2024 · 26 posts)September 8, 2026, 5:22 pm

Miriam Halstead said:

it benefits the publisher, which means the people asking you have an interest in your answer

That line is what did it. Not because anybody at the home is cynical, they are not, but because once I saw it that way I could not sign.

Asked the questions. Who decides: the activities lead, who is the person who filmed it. Record of who agreed to what: none, it is the form, and the form is the record. Would they take it down: yes of course, and no, nobody could say whether it would have been shared by then. Who else is in the frame: nobody had looked.

So I did not sign. I asked instead for the clip to be sent to me and my sister, and it was, that afternoon, with no fuss. My sister has watched it more times than she will admit. It is on nobody's page. He was singing again on Wednesday, which was the only part of this that was ever ours to have.