‘With no family visits, my mum wants to die’
AN anguished daughter barred from seeing her dementiastricken mother in a care home last night revealed her mum has told her: “I just want to die.”
For four years, great grandmother Anita Eccleston, 78, has been a resident at Bentley Court Nursing Home in Wolverhampton.
Anita Brown, 55, has been battling to get her father, Mark Eccleston, 81, essential care giver status to visit his wife but it has been refused.
The couple were forced to sell their home to pay for care costs.
But with no inside visits allowed, the family must greet ailing Anita through a window.
Yesterday her daughter was joined for an impersonal window visit at the home by sister Tinamarie Blakemore, 52.
Anita said: “Mum is brought to the window and I can see she is weeping yet cannot dab her eyes. She’s reaching for me but I can’t touch her. It’s torture, it’s utterly heartbreaking.
“She’s depressed, she cries at every window visit for us to get her out of there, and there is nothing I can do. I was crying uncontrollably at one of our window visits because mum said she just wanted to die.”
Her brother Antony Eccleston, 50, and Mark are due to visit today.As the home will be locked
down for another fortnight, Anita has got in touch with the home and the Care Quality Commission watchdog over her mum’s treatment.
She wrote: “Please take this as both a request for essential care giver status and a formal complaint about mum’s right to
social contact and interaction with family members and to have a family life in a safe controlled way being denied.”
The home has said it would undertake an assessment of Anita’s physical and emotional state to ascertain whether there is an “absolute need for her to have an essential care giver”.
Government guidelines state those granting essential care giver status must balance the risk of Covid infection against the deterioration of residents’ mental health and wellbeing.
The CQC watchdog said Bentley Court, run by Bondcare, “requires improvement”, after an inspection on June 10.
Bondcare said it is “committed to ensure the most possible access to families and has [increased] remote communication”.