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Victoria Law, a delegate at the Young Scotland Programme, writes for SR
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The care system
forgets the people
within us
Victoria Law
Intelligent, witty, humorous, strong-willed, talented and everybody’s best friend.
You may have an image of someone who fits this description. I am describing my 90-year-old grandmother.
Frail, forgetful and slow, a burden.
If I had written these words first, you might have thought I was describing a 90-year-old.
It is depressing, yet not all that surprising, how often you read and hear stories about poor elderly care in hospitals. Around 70% of all patients cared for by the NHS are over 65, yet despite this, the care system is failing. Too often when an elderly person ends up in hospital, he or she is viewed as an ‘old’ person, not as ‘a’ person, and provided with the most basic, impersonal and undignified form of care.
Communication in care is key. This quote from a dementia sufferer says it all:
As we become more emotional and less cognitive, it’s the way you talk to us, not what you say, that we will remember, we know the feeling but do not know the plot. Your smile, your laugh, your touch are what we will connect with. We’re still here in emotion and spirit – if only you could find us.
Sadly, it is not just lack of compassion that is an issue within the care system. Some of these patients have been known to die of starvation or dehydration because their food and drink intake is not properly monitored. There have been complaints of meals being left at the foot of the bed, and if they don’t have the mobility to sit up and feed themselves, it is then taken away and recorded as uneaten.
Other patients are given conflicting medications that react with one another, or exacerbate existing conditions causing further debilitation. They are stripped of their dignity and are subjected to examinations in full earshot of other patients. Many patients become incontinent because the staff ignore them when they buzz to be taken to the bathroom. In one case, an elderly man buzzed for an hour to be taken to the toilet; when the nurse eventually showed up she told him to go to the toilet in his chair as she was too busy to take him. His wife and family turned up that evening to find him still sitting in his own mess. They had to clean him themselves.
A radical shake-up of our care system is urgently required. The ratio of nurses for the elderly is one to 10, compared with one to four in a children’s ward where close similarities can be drawn in terms of dependency.
Victoria Law from Glasgow delivered this paper at the recent Young Scotland Programme
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