It’s time the elderly got some real care
IHAVE been grateful for many things in this lockdown: that I live alone on Dartmoor rather than in a cramped city flat filled with the din of fractious children; for time to watch the flowers grow and listen to the birds sing; for being without job or money worries; for not catching Covid and for not losing any immediate family to it. They are all huge blessings but if you asked me to name the single greatest I would say without hesitation that it has been not having a parent in a care home.
I have watched with horror while care home owners have turned into jailers, while old folk have died without seeing their nearest and dearest, while dementia patients cannot understand why nobody visits them any more and while one elderly lady knelt on the pavement to peer at her husband through railings. It has been cruel beyond belief. I honestly think that had I a mother in care I would have forced my way into the home and taken her away, defying the owner, the brutal government and the jobsworth police. Dear heaven.
EARLY on in the first lockdown, when this ineffable cruelty began, I wrote that it must surely be possible to nominate one visitor and allow him or her to visit in full PPE on the grounds that staff themselves are dealing with the elderly on exactly that basis. I hold to that view. Whatever else, this must never happen again and indeed should never have been allowed to continue so long. The law should now specify that care homes must keep a supply of PPE sufficient to enable one visitor twice a week per resident. No patient with Covid should be discharged from hospital into a care home, a practice which was rife in the early stages of the pandemic, even though the disease was at its most deadly in the old and the sick. Families who can should be allowed to remove residents into their own care. What about it, Boris?
A THREE-YEAR wait to see the dentist? No face-to-face consultation with a GP? The average NHS patient in this country could be forgiven for thinking the way to quicker treatment might be in prison or parts of the Third World – and that patient would not be far wrong.