9780463736838_

I faced a terrifying prospect of guardianship over our lives. A hospital safeguarding warning, which is pretty much at the drop of a hat, sought deprivation of liberties no less. This suspicion of mother abuse, as baseless as it was base, and without exhoneration or apology, against an old man, they knew nothing of, who had no history or record of any offenses. Subjugating me would also subjugate my mother to state control. We would become wards of state without citizens rights.
Dilatory and doubting social services pressured me into giving-in to put Mum in a care home. She languished over one hundred days in hospitals. I had to commute by train to see her. The social worker said she was looking for a placement, doubting my ability to cope at home, and not pursuing the live-in carer option, even when she answered her questions. Then saying she would have to look for care homes further afield. That is to say out of my reach, against which I protested. So I found a care home on the outskirts of town, for which understanding the social worker thanked me.
But it was another hospital environment, leaving Ella stuck in a chair from morning till night. (Private care home, with public hospital, harassed a visiting relative to supply their promiscuous laundry.)
Social services again blocked my mother from coming home with another live-in care agency. The social worker responsible was replaced by something of a cognitive twin. The social worker visited Ella to ascertain the wishes of the social worker.
I was manipulated. But when manipulation failed before the reality of Mums misery, compulsion followed, with misepresentation and manipulation of the reality of Mums wishes.
I am not criticising the undoubted inadequacies of care homes but the determination of social services to prevent my mother having live-in care, instead. Economics reduces care homes to patient parking zones. The staff may try to engage with their paying guests but are continually faced with attending to their basic needs. There have to be a lot of inmates to make the business pay, or wages are likely to be driven down. The care home manager (doing a real job) was on a different level to the social workers I had the misfortune to encounter.
Care homes are really on the hotel model, for active, not chair-bound, people. (I visited a brand new care home, and it reminded me of nothing so much as a plush hotel.) The chair is still the care homes basic utility. For many still active old people it is adequate. For the disabled, it can be a prehistoric instrument of torture, that needs replacing, in this scientific age, by more versatile equipment, fitted for the immobile, to prevent becoming living dummies, and able to exercise their restlessness, so they will not get seat sores.
I thought, in the old way, that people could check themselves out of hospital. Not so, with the care home, Ella was locked-in, like a safe deposit. It appears to be under-pinned by a sinister-sounding legality called deprivation of liberties best interests, just another brick in the wall of the New Feudalism.
A live-in care agency says that 97 of people would prefer to stay at home, when needing care. A fact, towards which, social services have been strangely obtuse, in pursuing (We know) best interests. This is not a reason, it is just social services asserting its dictatorship, thanks to politicians passion for autocratic administrative law.
While keeping a smile, Ella asked eloquently, amongst other things, why was she not allowed to go home? She was not a criminal. She hadnt done anything wrong. What are they doing this for? They do it because they can get away with it - Give themselves a job, I suppose.
The visiting masseur, she addressed, said Ella had compos mentis. She said: Dont give up. But Ella would become too weak of mind and body. The social services sinecure was depriving her of all faith, hope and care.

...

Filtros

gnome-coming