I’m not a big fan of anniversaries. The ones you want to forget, you remember. The ones you want to remember, you forget.
And so it was I found myself wide awake early this morning exactly a year to the hour since my mum, Sheila Hartman, was attacked in her care home bedroom by another resident. Beaten about the head and body with a walking stick, the images of her dying from her injuries in hospital later that same day were still so sharp in the gloom it was as if they were were being projected onto the bedroom ceiling.
So why am I sharing this? I don’t want your sympathy (although thank you again for your abundant care and concern when if first happened). No, I am writing this less as a grieving son and more as a journalist who wants to highlight a number of issues.
Slow justice is no justice
Firstly, the wheels of justice turn painfully slowly. Operation Vectra, the name given to the police inquiry, has been closed. No case could be brought against the killer because she was, like my mum, living with the consequences of dementia and unaware of her actions. (And in any case she too has now died aged 92. We sent her family our condolences and assured them we bore her no ill will).
But the inquest won’t be until mid December at the earliest. The CQC (Care Quality Commission) is still contemplating criminal action against the provider, HC-One. Central Bedfordshire Council’s safeguarding adults board hasn’t yet appointed a reviewer – or if it has I haven’t been told. And all the while the lessons that might be learned from these various inquiries to keep other vulnerable people safe are delayed – although to be fair to HC-One they’ve already made significant changes to staffing, training and management following their own much swifter internal investigation led by Nick Moor at Niche Health and Social Care Consulting. I thank Julie Kerry, HC-One’s chief nurse and director of quality, for allowing me to contribute to this review. That notwithstanding, the way we look after older people as a society – especially those living with dementia and other challenging health conditions – is woefully inadequate and needs reconfiguring. Which bring me onto my next point…
Broken system
Whilst there are some fantastic providers out there, the way residential care is delivered generally follows a broken template. Poorly designed or badly converted buildings. Person-centered care delivered too often in name only by too few staff who are almost always overworked, underpaid and undervalued. A two tier system of fees where residents who can afford it pay as much as £1500 a week – twice that of those who can’t and whose bills are settled instead by cash-strapped local authorities. Byzantine corporate structures where it’s virtually impossible to tell who the ultimate beneficiaries are of the eye-watering sums of money the biggest operators generate which allow sceptics like me to believe that too much emphasis is placed on shareholder profit at the expense of stakeholder loss. It’s a sick kind of financial balance sheet that can lead to threadbare and soiled bedsheets.
There’s got to be a better way
I’m not suggesting a revolutionary change. But let’s create space in the sector for the sort of innovation in the built and human environments promoted by Roland McMorran and his Maracuja Club. Places where older people (and staff for that matter) actually want to go rather than dread. Because for now I hear too many people say, in all seriousness, “I’d rather you shot or smothered me than put me in one of those homes.” I guess it all comes down ultimately to what value we attach to older people. Whether we see caring for them as an investment or a cost and who picks up the tab when an individual can’t pay their own way for whatever reason. So my third point follows on from this…
Invisible people
We fetishise youth. The media worships youthful good looks. Look at what happened to my former BBC colleague, Miriam O’Reilly, deemed too old for Countryfile. That was more than 12 years ago yet older people remain largely invisible on our screens. I can’t help thinking if this had happened to a child, for example in a children’s home rather than a care home, the case would still be making headlines and there would be calls for a Sheila’s Law. Perhaps it’s just that I’ve not been vocal enough. Or that the majority genuinely believe older people are like batteries to be tossed out with the rubbish when they run out of juice.
Let’s wake up. There is no elixir. Short of dying young, old age is inevitable. And while the steady increase in life expectancy (now flattening out) over the generations is largely good news, what’s less good is that the number of years we can no longer live independently is increasing too. So let’s plan for it properly. And have a debate about what we really want in our final years. I can’t see the Club 18-30 and Centre Parcs generations being satisfied with the current set up!
Finally what have I learned and how have I changed personally in the past year? That I might have enjoyed a career in the legal profession instead of the media. I had no idea there was so much satisfaction to be gained from poring over Supreme Court rulings in cases like Jamieson and Middleton.
That I no longer have the stomach to shoot the rabbits that plague our garden in non-myxomatosis years.
That as humans we get worked up about the silliest of things. Sad as the loss of the Sycamore Gap tree is, it’s only a tree. Totemic, I understand, and perhaps, therefore, something to mourn when the wider loss of habitat and species is, paradoxically, so vast as to be nigh on invisible.
And the final lesson? That going for a long walk is a good way of helping red hot anger metamorphosise into a cooler determination. Wave if you see me.