Thoughts of a carer

  There have recently (August 2024) been protests and indeed violent disturbances apparently because of issues involving migrants. I’m not going to delve into the issues that the mainstream media, and politicians, have been discussing; Viv and I have personal, recent, experience of the effectiveness of overseas recruits working in close contact with the public in England.   I have revised this post in case anything I had initially written could possibly have been misunderstood. That I should feel it necessary to do this at 3.30 on a Saturday morning is a sad reflection on modern society.   + + + For years we’ve heard of a ‘social care crisis’: there aren’t enough care workers to fulfil demand; hospitals won’t discharge patients unless care is arranged for them, and the health and care aspect of the welfare state is gradually grinding to a halt. Viv and I have been ‘service users’ (that’s what they call beneficiaries of social care) on and off for the last seven years, all...

‘ You must stay at home’ - Rt. Hon. Boris Johnson, Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, 23 March 2020. To paraphrase his hero, never in the field of human endeavour has a Prime Minister spoken five so poorly considered words that would impact so many. It's not as if likely problems with this approach were unknown: in January 2017, Dr. Amit Arora wrote a blog note on the topic of ‘Deconditioning Awareness’ for the NHS England website, of which the ‘experts’ advising the PM must surely have been aware: ‘Time to move: Get up, get dressed, keep moving’; it explains, in layman’s terms, why restricting the mobility of the elderly is a bad idea.   *** The NHS is at breaking point: that we know. The reasons given are many and varied, but the underlying cause is that old chestnut, bed-blocking. Patients, many elderly and vulnerable, cannot be discharged home without full engagement of necessary social care support. This takes time; during that time said patient takes up a hospital bed....