Daily Dispatch
Upgrade safeguards
THE story dominating our front pages this week about the repeated violent abuse of an 84-year-old cancer sufferer, Hope Shepherd, allegedly by her caregiver at the Lily Kirchmann frail care centre in East London, is a shocking one.
More horrifying than the written account is the video footage from a hidden camera secretly installed in the victim’s room by her daughter, Bernice Robertson after she became alarmed by the injuries and bruising her mother continued to suffer over at least two months.
As we reported yesterday the footage shows a series of protracted and brutal assaults including punches to the head with a fist, blows inflicted with an elbow to the frail octogenarian’s head and back, a kick in the torso, blows with a deodorant can to the head as well as spraying its contents into a breathing hole in Shepherd’s throat, grabbing the elderly woman by her hair and flinging her onto her bed, and tying her to a wheelchair for hours.
Ncediswa Mkenkcele, a caregiver who resigned from Lily Kirchmann after the footage surfaced, appeared in the East London Magistrate’s Court on Tuesday charged with assault with intent to cause grievous bodily harm.
Abuse of the elderly is hardly a new problem in South Africa. The government has investigated it, a clutch of organisations exist to address it and it frequently takes place at the hands of an elderly person’s family, community and even government officials.
Old age homes are also not exempt, as many people with experience of these institutions will attest to.
Berea Gardens Retirement Foundation executive director Mike Schulze says the case is the first known assault of this nature at the complex in the nine years he has been executive director, and “to the best of my knowledge is the first case of this nature in the history of the foundation”.
But how on earth is it that the management of an institution where the core function is to care for the elderly missed evidence as obvious and as serious as a broken arm, a black eye, bruises and swellings – injuries that continued to mount over several months and that so distressed Shepherd’s daughter that she resorted to installing a camera?
A simple search of the internet provides – in less than 30 seconds – a list of the all-to-common warning signs that an elderly person is being abused: “Signs vary from physical, such as bruises, scratches, cuts, malnutrition … and behavioural such as withdrawal, fear and anxiety.”
Either the laws regulating homes for the aged, and possibly the occupation of care-giving, leave much to be desired, or they are not being properly enforced.
Making selected video monitoring mandatory at such institutions, as is increasingly the trend in many other countries, may be one way to help address the problem.