These women deserve to know how relatives died

It makes for uncomfortable reading and our Wednesday Agenda feature today might shock you too. If nothing else, the claims by the two women featured – a daughter and a granddaughter – about the way they think their relatives were treated in Glen Heathers Nursing Home, Lee-onthe-Solent, will upset you.

At the end of the article a spokesman for the home says: ‘All matters were fully investigated with the relevant authorities and concluded satisfactorily.’

Not for Ruth Warlow and Lydia McKay they weren’t.

These two women really do deserve answers, and therefore some closure, about the treatment their father and grandmother respectively received.

One of Lydia’s harrowing memories of lockdown was walking past the home and seeing her grandmother Peggy Gibbs, 92, through the window. ‘She looked like a concentration camp victim,’ she tells us today.

Ruth says she is still fighting for basic information about the death of her father, 80-year-old Ivor Collins. This includes: When he died; how he died; if anyone was with him when he died; where his belongings went, and where his ashes were scattered.

‘Next of kin means nothing - I’m still being denied to find out what happened to my father,’ she says.

The fact Glen Heathers will close next week after being rated inadequate for the second time by the Care Quality Commission, is cold comfort to the women.

A CQC report said investigators found the home ‘unclean and cluttered’ with a hole in the floor, and identified ‘unsafe care and treatment’ which left residents at ‘risk of malnutrition’ and ‘pressure sores’.

Ruth and Lydia are right to want answers yet fear the information might disappear once the home closes. We hope for their sake, those explanations are forthcoming. It’s the least they deserve.