Picture of a war hero that shames our care system
LIKE many of his contemporaries, Malcolm Muirhead asked for relatively little from the state throughout his long life.
The former civil servant served in the RAF in India during the Second World War.
As a young man fighting for his country, he could never have foreseen the cruel indignities he would endure in his final days.
In this disturbing image, the 94-year-old lies in a hospital bed, emaciated – indeed, nearskeletal – his face contorted in wordless agony.
For Mr Muirhead, this bed was in fact a salvation from the hell of a care home run by the City of Edinburgh Council.
He lost a stone-and-a-half in a month while he languished at the Drumbrae home, which had been banned from taking more residents following a damning report by the Care Inspectorate.
It was only when social workers raised serious concerns about Mr Muirhead and he was moved to hospital that he learned Drumbrae had been closed – tragically too late to prevent his own ordeal.
The social work report noted his weight loss, described as ‘significant’, and recorded he was only being washed once a week– in a sink – having fallen in his shower area.
Disregard
There were other observations of an apparent disregard for the pensioner’s basic wellbeing: he was wearing a ‘dirtied jumper’ with food stains, had bloated feet, overgrown nails and infected toes.
Hamid Khosrowpour, a friend of Mr Muirhead, said he only found out Drumbrae was shut to new admissions after receiving details of the war veteran’s individual assessment.
Alarmed at its disclosures, he demanded a GP should be called in. On May 14, Mr Muirhead was admitted to the Western General Hospital in Edinburgh, where he died a week later.
Mr Khosrowpour said: ‘When I asked, they said Malcolm doesn’t show any interest in eating or drinking. He drank when I gave him juice and he said he was hungry.
‘On May 14, the doctor went in to see Malcolm. He sent him to hospital because he was badly dehydrated and needed fluid.
‘When he went into hospital, the doctor said he couldn’t find a vein. He body was full of infection. In two days, they gave him seven bags of fluid and said still they couldn’t hydrate him.’
The Care Inspectorate report was published in March, following a visit to Drumbrae last December, and stipulated the home should meet a legal requirement to ‘ensure that residents at risk of not eating or drinking enough receive sufficient help to reduce the risk of poor nutrition and dehydration’.
Its findings also ‘showed that some staff seemed to lack the knowledge and skills they needed to meet residents’ needs in a range of areas’.
The report noted a requirement from a previous inspection to have dieticians monitor vulnerable service users’ weight ‘to identify any risk of significant weight loss, risk of malnutrition and/or dehydration’ had not been met.
It also identified errors being made with medicines, pain being ‘poorly understood’ by workers and rotas not meeting minimum staffing levels.
Judith Proctor, chief officer of the Edinburgh Health and Social Care Partnership, said: ‘We take all inspection reports and feedback from service users and their families very seriously and investigate all complaints raised.
‘The partnership will continue to work with the Care Inspectorate and Drumbrae to improve their practice.’
Overhaul
Euphemisms abound in official jargon, but the notion of ‘improvement’ rather than a complete overhaul is telling: as if all that’s needed is a slight modification of practice.
Nor is Drumbrae alone in providing substandard care: a Care Inspectorate report published last year found a quarter of Scotland’s care homes were unsatisfactory, weak or merely adequate – albeit that 75.5 per cent received good, very good or excellent results.
There are many committed individuals working in care homes who are dedicated to looking after the elderly and vulnerable – but too many shocking cases have revealed that a minority of staff lack the requisite compassion.
Four years ago, care worker Sharon Young was found guilty of abuse after she humiliated a severely disabled pensioner at Rosaburn House in East Kilbride, Lanarkshire.
In 2012, Janice Glover was convicted of a campaign of abuse against 81-year-old dementia sufferer William Thomson at Claremont Nursing Home in Ayr.
Infection
Meanwhile, a report last month found an average of three residents in every Scottish care home had a healthcare associated infection at any one time.
Health Protection Scotland called for new measures to tackle urinary tract and skin infections and respiratory infections such as colds, flu or pneumonia.
In recent years, the focus of elderly care has switched decisively towards keeping pensioners in their own homes.
The direction of travel was set out in 2011, when the Scottish Government and the council umbrella body Cosla published a blueprint for housing for the elderly, covering the following decade.
The plan stressed the ‘importance of supporting people to remain at home independently for as long as possible’.
A £70million ‘change fund’ was set up by ministers with the aim of bolstering the independence of older people – a process dubbed ‘shifting the balance of care’.
But a document published at the time to explain the strategy made clear that less would be spent on care homes to fund the move.
For Mr Muirhead, a childless widower, and many more with similar health problems, remaining at home was simply no longer an option.
Yet official statistics show our population is ageing and the number of people aged 75 and above has rocketed by 31 per cent in the past two decades, while the number of those aged 65-74 has risen by 27 per cent.
The haunting image on this page of a man allowed to waste away by the state he fought to protect should act as a powerful reminder of the duty we owe to the many thousands who will depend on our help in generations to come.