Sending elderly couples to separate care homes is inhumane, says top judge
SEPARATING elderly couples when they go into care is inhumane and could cause them to die of a broken heart, Britain’s most senior family judge has said.
Sir James Munby said he was outraged to read reports of frail, vulnerable couples who wanted to live together being refused shared accommodation.
The president of the High Court’s family division called on social workers to apply a ‘common decency test’ before forcing husbands and wives into different homes or only placing one in a care home.
In a speech to social work chiefs, he said: ‘I read with personal outrage reports of cases where people who may have been together for 30, 40 or maybe 50 years, are separated in their final years. That is simply inhumanity.’
The Daily Mail has highlighted the issue in our Dignity for the Elderly campaign. Splitting up couples began in the 1990s when care home residents stopped being supported by benefits.
Instead councils took over paying fees under a means-test system. As a result social workers have refused to fund care home places for couples. Fees average around £650 a week in England for a place without nursing care.
Recent cases include that of Rafaello and Isabel Gerra, parted at Christmas 2014 when Milton Keynes social workers said that 84-year-old Mr Gerra should not be allowed to go into a nursing home with his 70-year- old wife, but must move elsewhere.
In the same year, social workers in Nottinghamshire ruled that stroke victim Norman Howe was not unwell enough to go into a nursing home.
They told his wife, Karen, that if she had difficulties caring for her husband she should leave him, telling her that she ‘does not have to continue to live with her husband if she no longer wishes.’
Sir James told the Association of Directors of Adult Social Services conference in Stafford on Tues- day: ‘We do know that people die from what colloquially we call a broken heart. It is very striking.
‘One reads cases where one spouse, after a 60 or 50-year marriage, has died and the other dies two days later. That is not chance or coincidence, I suspect.
‘How long do people last if they are uprooted? A very short time.
‘It may mean putting them in some nice modern building which no doubt satisfies the building inspector but is simply not home to them.’ Margaret Willcox, president of the association, said staff work ‘ hard and sensitively’ and ‘do whatever they can to keep couples together’.
The last promise by a government to try to prevent frail couples from being parted was given by Labour health secretary Alan Johnson nine years ago.
He told a Labour conference there should be extra specialised housing for couples, adding: ‘When a couple have lived all their lives together they should not be forced apart at the end of their lives.’