How did we lose our basic instinct - simple humanity?
Maurice O'Brien • Published 3 Jun 2011 09:30
1 Comment
AS SCANDALS go it was hardly of tsunami proportions. Were the victims dogs or cats, or even a retired circus elephant, then the furore might well have been greater.
But as it involved elderly humans the relatively minor shock waves faded quickly. Until the next time.
A few banner headlines, and plenty of coverage on the BBC, possibly because one of its former journalists chose to speak eloquently about the heart-rending demise of her 96-year-old mother, but by and large we seem, as they say these days when nobody wants a fuss, to have moved on.
The Care Quality Commission's most disquieting revelation involved doctors at London's Royal Free Hospital needing to write a prescription to ensure their elderly patients could quench their thirst. When surgeon William Marsden founded the Royal Free in Holborn in 1828, to provide free care for patients of little means, one imagines even his worst nightmares never featured such abominations happening on its wards 183 years later.
Neither would he have expected Andrew Reid, chief executive at Ipswich Hospital, one of the other two named and shamed by the CQC for failing to provide even basic care for the elderly, to wriggle ignominiously during a three minute interview on the Today programme before grudgingly making what barely passed for an apology.
Letting patients literally rot in their soiled bed clothes, denying them food and refusing even the simple human contact of a friendly passing word, were among the CQC's damning findings. But neglect can exist in many forms on a geriatric ward.
I recall my 81-year-old mother's final days in Turner ward at the old Battle Hospital. Certainly she was spotlessly clean, sheets crisply folded to her chin and blankets tucked in so tightly that she could barely move a feeble muscle. But her isolated side room suggested she was conveniently out of sight and out of mind; hers and theirs.
My two sisters and I visited daily, always separately and at different times, but just once in two weeks did we ever find a member of the medical staff who knew anything about her condition; except for the kindly nurse who ushered us to her bedside before she drew her final breath in the early hours of a May morning in 1998.
Undoubtedly the blame can lie with understaffing, overworked nurses and auxiliaries, lack of resources and even the unglamorous nature of caring for the elderly.
But where along the way did we manage to mislay simple humanity?
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Philippa Hutchinson
Unregistered User
Jun 4, 10:31
Report commentThe allegation concerning the prescription of water was not made in the report about the Royal Free but in the report about one of the other hospitals the Care Quality Commission visited.
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Jun 12, 22:13
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