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Britain’s care home shame - urge your MP to sign EDM 2251

Sarah Evans Andover
18th October 2011 at 05:51
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Published in the Morning Star, October 18, 2011 http://www.morningstaronline.co.uk/news/content/view/full/110839

Across the country local authorities have been effectively signing death warrants for thousands of elderly people.

Encouraged by the policies of successive governments, they have been waging a silent war against our old folk by closing local authority care homes.

When an elderly people’s home closes around half of residents die between three and eight months of hearing the news or being moved.

That is the chilling statistic revealed by campaigning solicitor Yvonne Hossack, based on “outcome mortality data” obtained following the closures of homes in Hull, Southampton and Wolverhampton.

The stress and trauma, the loss of a family of close friends and the loss of regular carers can trigger health problems and depression, and many simply give up on life.

At best, many authorities are ignorant of the risk to life posed by care home closures. At worst some can only be seen as complicit in corporate manslaughter.

Incredibly, local authorities are not obliged to keep records on the mortality outcomes following care home closures.

It is chilling to hear the relatives of elderly residents, most of them from what Ed Miliband would identify as “middle” England and with no history of political activism, accuse a local authority of euthanasia.

But that is exactly how campaigners who have been fighting to save a local authority home in Andover have described the actions of Hampshire County Council in closing Cherry Orchard, which is home to just under 20 elderly people.

The disingenuous arguments deployed to justify closures like this and many others around the country would be laughable if the results were not so tragic.

Tory-controlled Hampshire council closed the doors on new entrants to Cherry Orchard around the time it announced its plans to close the home - and then argued that the home wasn’t full.

The authority said there was shrinking demand for residential care - a sick joke to one campaigner who had been days away from having to move her dad 200 miles away because there weren’t any beds in the town.

Hampshire County Council has fewer excuses than most, boasting among the biggest reserves in the country - over £250 million for its “rainy day fund.”

But for the residents at Cherry Orchard and their families it is already pouring, and the council’s refusal to use any of its reserves but instead to cut further and faster than even the government is demanding underlines its ideological hatred of public services.

The campaign to keep Cherry Orchard open has struck a chord in Andover. Elderly residents have been left in tears and placed under massive stress by the consistently insensitive treatment by the council, which also threatened staff that they would lose their redundancy pay if they spoke out - behaviour which has angered many in the town.

It is a situation being played out across the country.

The crisis is about to balloon as the Con-Dem government’s ideological attack on our public services deepens and their cuts send the economy into a double-dip recession, which will in turn tip the private equity-financed care home “industry” into the abyss, leaving vulnerable elderly people without a home or care - unless the state steps in very quickly and starts taking responsibility.

Already Four Seasons, the company stepping in to “save” Southern Cross, is reported to be in need of refinancing its own debt.

Despite a growing elderly population, some local authorities argue that more people want to be cared for at home and that fewer people want residential care.

Of course no-one wants to get old and need help from a stranger with the most intimate of functions - we all hope to be active until we pop our clogs.

But it is when people can no longer stay in their own homes that they may need residential care, and it is government policy over the last 20 years that has made access to it progressively more difficult, while increasingly what provision there is is now in the hands of profit-hungry private-sector granny farmers.

Extra care at home is great if it works, but that is not always the case.

Far too often private contractors with pared-down staff on low pay and with minimal training leave elderly folk in their own faeces and without food and water.

Family members denied access to support are left to become unpaid carers themselves - many are forced to give up their jobs and put their own well-being at risk.

This might save the exchequer billions, but it is a false economy, as full-time carers are no longer taxpayers and there is an incalculable burden on the health service.

Pre-booking respite is often not possible in the private sector, and costs around twice as much as local authority respite care.

Yet despite this national care crisis, local authority homes are still closing.

One person who is all too familiar with this brutality is Yvonne Hossack, whose campaigning advocacy has saved more than 80 local authority care homes from closure - and who likens government policy, including that of the previous new Labour administration, to mass murder.

“There is an urgent need for the government to impose a moratorium on local authority care home closures and for a public inquiry into the deaths of old folk following closures,” says Hossack.

That call has now been tabled in Parliament by Hayes and Harlington MP John McDonnell, in an early day motion welcomed by organisations including the National Pensioners Convention and CarerWatch.

Local authority care homes are a cornerstone of a caring society that has taken decades to build and we have to stop local authorities closing any more of them if we are to prevent a major catastrophe.

Transferring caring responsibility to privateers who put profit ahead of care will only result in more abuse and more unnecessary deaths - yet, as with the government’s wider war on public services and the NHS, that is the prospect facing us.

All of us might one day need a decent, professionally run care home for ourselves or a loved one, and it is in all our interests to demand an end to the closures.

We can start by urging our MPs to sign EDM 2251.

EDM 2251: The contents
This House notes with deep concern the worsening crisis for elderly care as growing numbers of local authority and private care homes face closure

Acknowledges concerns that the loss of elderly people’s care homes causes fear, anxiety and, in many cases, a higher mortality rate when vulnerable, elderly people are forced to leave their homes

Further notes that the Southern Cross crisis will increase the need for local authority care

And therefore calls on the government to hold a public inquiry into the deaths following closures of local authority care homes and impose a moratorium on the closure of local authority care homes until that inquiry publishes its results to ensure that vulnerable, elderly people’s lives are not put at further risk.

Tags: care home crisis (1) | four seasons (1) | hampshire county council (1) | john mcdonnell mp (1) | southern cross (1) | yvonne hossack (1)

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