Who cares?

It was with great interest that I read about the staffing crisis in elderly care in Scotland (your report, 18 September). Having worked in this area, I have always been astonished by how complacent we are about the care of the elderly in a modern progressive Scotland with its own Parliament, and wondered why we aren’t marching on Holyrood. Of course the Parliament has done some good things in this area with Free Personal Care, but the demand and resources and money needed do not seem to match this. With the predictions about the incidence of dementia amongst older people increasing at an alarming rate year on year, one wonders what the future holds for all of us in old age.

It is not only a staffing crisis we should worry about, but large care settings for elderly people.

We have managed to getaway from this large-scale model of care for children and adults and invest in much smaller, homely care settings, but somehow it seems acceptable that our elderly have to settle with living with possibly 40 or more people in a typical care home. Is this the type of care you want for yourself or your loved ones ?

Even with the advent of integration of Health and Social Care, these areas should have been much improved by now but they seem worse now than they have ever been.

Why is that, after all these years of running our own Health & Social Care ?

J BERRY Nicol Street , Kirkcaldy