The big story in health today is undoubtedly that of
Stafford hospital and the maltreatment of the elderly in their care. People wandering the corridors, drinking water out of flower vases because they were so thirsty, patients lying in soiled beds.. The list goes on and on. Now heads are going to roll and already the media is trying to establish ‘who is to blame’. But do you know the shocking thing about this story? The shocking thing is that it’s not shocking, at least not to those of us who work in the care system or are recipients of it. Across Britain today, there will be nurses, doctors, carers and social workers nodding their heads grimly at this, because this problem is present to a greater or lesser extent everywhere in care homes and hospitals. It is endemic. But why is this happening? That is what I am going to talk about in this post.
As those of you who are regularly on this blog know, I care for my mum who has Alzheimers. One day six years ago, I came to the conclusion that every problem that I had with my mum’s care had a political root, and if anything was going to change, I had to get involved in politics and try to change it from there. The particular thing that triggered me was the closure of nursing homes in my area. Why, when we had a growing elderly population, was our council shutting nursing homes? Shouldn’t they have been increasing them? I went along to a carer’s conference to ask that question. There was a good crowd there and there was a mixture of carers and professionals from the NHS and social work. I got hold of the mike and put my question to the chair, ‘Why are we shutting nursing homes when we have a growing elderly population, and where are all the elderly going to go?’
I still remember the deathly chill that followed my question. Up until that point, things had been fairly cheerful and there was a buzz of chat; suddenly the whole place was quiet and the temperature dropped about ten degrees. The answer that I was given was that they did not want to shut nursing homes, but there was a problem with the cost as we had a growing number of elderly people. Afterwards, one of the social workers came up to me.
‘I really want to thank you for asking that question’, she said. ‘ We all wanted to ask that, but we were too scared to.’
The answer that I was given was in no way acceptable, but it is true. The reason that nursing homes are shutting and the reason that Stafford hospital happened, is because there are a growing number of elderly and we do not want to fund the cost of their care. This cost cutting has been going on for a number of years in various forms;
Closure of day hospitals, cottage hospitals and local authority nursing homes;
Re-defining care of long term conditions such as dementia as ‘social care’, thus shifting funding of the person’s care to the much smaller local authority budget;
Spending only £11 per head on dementia research as compared with £289 per head for cancer;
Reducing the numbers of beds in hospitals, so that there is no room for geriatric ‘bed blockers’;
Setting impossible financial targets that can only be achieved by cutting staff and therefore leaving wards understaffed;
Persecuting anyone who dares to complain about standards.
Dr Rita Pal’s story is a salutory warning for anyone in the NHS contemplating rebellion.
But it is not just central government that is to blame. The media are very much to blame as well. Why? Because they have under-reported it. And they have done this, I believe, quite consciously. I have been on several media sites tonight looking at the Stafford story and a notable number of sites that usually have a comment facility for stories, have not enabled commenting. On the BBC site, commenting is allowed, but the person has to give a name and an email address. It has not included the story on its ‘Have Your Say’ section, which you would expect for a scandal like this. This means that NHS workers and other professionals who wish to report a similar situation, but remain anonymous, cannot do so.
Which brings me to my final point. Now there’s been a three week gap between this post and the last and there’s been a reason for that. And the reason was that I did not want to say what I am going to say now, but the Stafford hospital situation has given me the impetus to do so. It’s this. If you take away elderly care homes, if you do not fund research into elderly diseases, if you take away their hospital beds,
if you take away dementia medicines as NICE has done, and if you leave them in soiled beds, and reduce them to drinking water out of flower vases because you are too busy to give them fluids; if you constantly say, ‘ We can’t afford to look after you’, what is the next logical step in this process?
Get rid of them.
And that is why, Margo, no matter who puts forward the argument (and you are an MSP that I like), no matter how many programmes the BBC puts on in sympathy, no matter how untrendy it is made to oppose euthanasia, that is why I will never, ever, ever, support a change in the law to make euthanasia legal and ‘give people a choice’. The elderly, the disabled and the weakest in our society would be left completely exposed in the face of such a ‘choice’ and completely at the mercy of the grey men with clipboards who are constantly striving for such ‘streamlining’. Money drives policy and this is an area of policy that would shift very quickly from compassion to economics. People rarely venture into territory like this on their own, but as with the Stafford situation, staff can be bullied, overworked, undermined and frightened into an abusive situation and come to regard it as normal and that is why the law should remain as it is.
Finally, to go back to the carer’s conference. A few weeks later I was attending a meeting with some of the people who had been there and we started talking about care of the elderly. One of them said how she had asked the same question as myself in her office and the person in charge said, ‘In a few years, the elderly won’t be a problem.’
You have been warned.
