The Departure Lounge at Deathrow

Rachel Johnson, writing at the Sunday Times of London, absolutely trashes the British National Health Service over its treatment of the elderly. Johnson is commenting on the same report that I did a few days ago. It is not pretty.

My grandmother moved from her flat in Oxford to a private care home in Vicarage Gate in Kensington after my grandfather died, to be nearer to some of her five children. There were written assurances provided that the home – run by the charity that used to be the Distressed Gentlefolk’s Association – would not close, and the place would provide my grandmother with a home for the rest of her days.

Sure enough, a mere three years later the site was flogged off, as sure as night follows day, for private development. The residents were offered a move to another home, miles across town in Elephant and Castle. She was told that all the staff who had looked after her, and to whom she had become close, would accompany them. On that basis, my grandmother moved south of the river.

When she got to the new place, she saw none of the same faces, and lived in a small bedroom with a little window too high for her to look out of. Like many other residents who suffered the trauma of the move, she succumbed to what geriatric professionals called “accelerated death syndrome” and died a year later.

So I didn’t need the 100-page report issued last week by the Joint Committee on Human Rights on older people in healthcare to know that in too many cases the elderly don’t have any human rights. But when I did read it – and the report should be required reading to everyone stuck in middle youth who goes around saying things like 60 is the new 40 and clings desperately to the delusion that old age is a sad and unattractive thing that happens to other people – it made me both very ashamed and also rather relieved. My grandmother was one of the lucky ones.

Although my grandmother was ultimately betrayed by the people she depended on, she was not evicted for complaining, bullied, drugged into quietude, left in her own faeces or urine for hours, sexually abused, neglected, illtreated, starved or dehydrated. But according to the report these abuses are common, and Age Concern estimates that half a million older people are suffering them at any one time in Britain. If we treated our children and infants half as cruelly as we treat our elderly, many parents would be in prison.

Other countries are civilised in comparison. The peers and MPs visited Denmark and Sweden, where elderly people remained in situ, and as their needs increased, so did the care provided.

Johnson is not impressed with the National "Health" Service and its treatment of seniors. It kind of puts a new perspective on the Who song, My Generation:

People try to put us d-down (talkin bout my generation)
People try to put us d-down (talkin bout my generation)
Just because we get around (talkin bout my generation)
Just because we get around (talkin bout my generation)
Things they do look awful c-c-cold (talkin bout my generation)
Things they do look awful c-c-cold (talkin bout my generation)
I hope I die before I get old (talkin bout my generation)
I hope I die before I get old (talkin bout my generation)

Things they do look awful c-c-c-cold.

(Still think socialized medicine is a good thing?)