Perhaps it’s because I’m closer to needing services for the elderly that I’m pretty horrified by reports today from the Health Services Ombudsman that provision is failing to treat older people with care, dignity and respect. I’m not sure why I am surprised, because I remember forty years ago going into a care home and being pretty appalled by the treatment I saw.
Even then nurses and care workers talked to elderly patients with that condescending and patronising lilt. You might have come across it yourself:
“How are you today … dear.” Not even my wife calls me dear, so by what right do you, a seventeen year old girl, have to call me ‘dear’. I am not your ‘dear’; I am a person who has earned, through years of hard labour, the right to respect.
“Now come on Annie, you really should eat you dinner – it will do you good.” No it won’t. It is hospital food. The cabbage has been boiled for over an hour and has the consistency of limp seaweed; it tastes like the algae from a brickworks lake and has the same colour as my fingernail. The chips are soggy and cold and the pie feels like it has been heated under the steamer on an espresso machine.
“Hello John, how are you today?” Which we all know is really shorthand for - “Good grief John, haven’t you had the decency to die yet? I’ve had this room booked for nearly two months and I do wish you’d get on with it.”
What about the entertainment care homes offer the elderly? Why do we assume they all enjoy tea dances, singalongs and bingo. Now readers I have a favour to ask all of you. If ever I have the misfortune to develop dementia, I want you all to promise me that before I have to play bingo, you will jointly and mutually euthanise me. As for the singalongs? Why do they assume that because you are old, you know songs from the Second World War? Not sure about the rest of my contemporaries, but I know the lyrics to a few Led Zeppelin and Rolling Stones songs.I could even croon “Boom Boom Pow by the Black Eyed Peas if you give me a bit of notice, though I suspect younger readers might be shocked by an oldtimer warbling a few curse words.
Old people aren’t looking for special privileges. They don’t want to be treated as special and different, but they do feel they have a right to respect – is that so awful? Is it so terrible that a woman in her seventies should have the right to undress in private, instead of having care assistants staying in the room, staring at her? Is it so bad a man, who has worked in a factory for over forty years, should feel it unjust that when he rings a bell for attention because he is in pain, no-one comes, or if they do, he feels a burden.
What is it about western society that degrades our elderly in this way? In eastern cultures older people are revered and respected. Here in the UK we see them as a nuisance.
You know something? A couple of years ago I was doing some research into problems facing older carers and I saw something I thought I would never see in a civilised society. I came across a woman in her late seventies who had a forty-four year old daughter with severe learning difficulties. The older woman had no support from external carers – she did all the work herself, even though she had quite severe heart problems. On my visit, I watch this wonderful old woman lift her fully grown daughter out of her wheel chair and carry her to a nearby sofa. I would guess the daughter would have been about 90lbs – certainly more than you would want to lift at that age. She never grumbled, because for her it was a joy to look after her daughter, even though caring was probably killing her. Can we truly say that, as sons and daughters, we would do the same for our parents, or grandparents?
She proved something to me though – older people are strong and resilient and can and do regularly cope with strife, difficulties and problems. They are talented and ingenious in their tactics for coping with the ardours of life and problems the system places upon them.
But there is more that could and should be done. If we ignore the needs of the elderly, we are not only dismissing part of our society, we are saying something about ourselves. Let’s face it, the message we are sending out is that people are disposable and once you go passed your ‘sell-by date’, you have no use.
To my mind, it’s no way to treat people and no way to lead a society.
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