Department passing buck on frail care
The prospect of growing helpless and frail in their old age is real for many South Africans – but very real, also, is the denialism that exists around this. And by denialism we are not referring to the elderly themselves, or to their families, but to state entities responsible for assisting those who have no other means of care in the event of debilitating illness or injury in their later years. The department of social development believes it is not legally mandated to provide frail care as such – only to establish “old age homes”. Frail care is a responsibility that should be shared with the health department, it says.
State frail care for all new patients has thus collapsed following an agreement between social development and a company called Eastern Cape Frail Care to not accept any new cases at either of the province’s two centres.
This is despite the fact there is a curator appointed by the court who can consider new admissions when requested to do so by social development.
Yet this curator says she has not once been contacted in this regard by the department, whose preferred strategy instead seems to be to wait for the remaining patients at the two centres to die out naturally. Problem solved, right?
Wrong. Because the truth is that patients desperately requiring state frail care will simply have nowhere to go. As much as social development’s Mzukisi Solani would like to believe frail elderly patients prefer being cared for by their families or the community, many families have neither the financial means nor the expertise required to care for someone with, say, dementia or severely compromised health. And the dwindling subsidies offered by the department are also making it increasingly impossible for NGOs to take in such patients without charging more.
The DA’s Bobby Stevenson is quite right when he says no caring government could simply abandon the most helpless members of society to die on the streets. The state has a moral responsibility to come up with a better strategy on how to care for elders in need of specialised care in a way that is both workable and compassionate.