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Flood of geriatric patients is upon us
• I WOULD like to add one or two things to Rose Hacker’s article (With help we can learn to live again, November 22).
My friend’s father, in his 90s, was taken to A & E at the local hospital and then transfered to the geriatric ward.
My friend reported that the medical attention was beyond reproach but the staff seemed to have no idea of how to deal with his dementia.
Therefore his two children mounted an exhausting 24-hour watch over him in order to give him the care he needed to keep him comfortable and dignified until he died nine days later. This in a geriatric ward.
My own mother, who was a beautiful and fastidious woman in her 80s was being looked after in a superb rehabilitation unit after she had broken her leg.
Some of their nurses were men.
On one of my twice daily visits I found she was in a shower cubicle with a male nurse who was washing her clean after an “accident”.
He was reproaching her for giving him such an unpleasant job.
He spoke very kindly but seemed to be quite unaware of how humiliating the situation was for her. And she had to endure it.
The flood of geriatric patients is already upon us. Surely we must acknowledge the need for specialist training for doctors, nurses and carers.
We need careful selection of trainees and staff and continual spot checks and supervision.
It is bad enough for people like Rose Hacker finding themselves dependent on others but even worse for those patients imprisoned within the debilitations of stroke or, increasingly, dementia.
It is a huge field of specialisation when you consider how rich and deep a 90-year-old’s history and background would be and that every patient presents different problems.
There are not enough homes for the very old and dependent, nor enough staff who know what they are doing and are dedicated to
doing it with love and care.
I certainly consider that family and friends have a very important part to play in the care for the aged.
One cannot expect the staff to bear the whole burden and then complain, perhaps on an infrequent visit, at the condition one might find a patient in.
Sometimes homes are not near enough for patients to be visited regularly.
Here I feel, for once, that the government should make it their business and should attend to the need as quickly as possible and fund it properly.
It takes time to train people, the right people who have feeling and respect for the old; it takes time to build the homes.
We would not like to have nurses looking after sick children who do not like children and we should not countenance people looking after the old who do not like them.
We do not have a good record of looking after our old people and it is time we as a nation decide to do something about it.
MM, NW2
name and address supplied
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