Continuing yesterday's theme.
Your elderly parent is in a care home. If Covid gets into the care home, there's a damned good chance, on the basis of past experience, your elderly parent will get it and die a horrible death.
The media highlight cases where children of elderly parents are complaining about not being able to see their parents. Given the objective of elderly people being in care homes is to preserve their lives, how would you feel if there was an outbreak, caused by the relative of another resident demanding to see their parent, and your parent died as a result?
The media focuses on generating column inches to sell papers. Good news doesn't sell papers, which is why the media is always full of bad news or focuses on irrelevancies - such as Nigel Farage. Farage's comments are irrelevant in terms of his political influence, but the media hangs on his every utterance.
Anti-vaxxers, lockdown protesters, conspiracy theorists and those who complain about not seeing their relatives in care homes are a small minority, but their influence is blown out of all proportion by the media looking for a story. A few cases where relatives of care home residents are genuinely upset is extrapolated to become a generality - it's human nature. What I'd like to see is a poll among care home residents' relatives before jumping to an unwarranted conclusion on the basis of a media interview with one or two examples where the relevant media outlet is looking to manufacture a story. Vivid examples are usually the exception, not the rule, precisely because they're vivid and rare - the rule is not newsworthy.
My experience of a care home, with my mother, was that she much preferred to chat to the other residents, with whom she had a common reference of shared experiences during the war, than talking to the likes of my brother or I, who she could no longer recognise anyway. She inhabited a world that was limited exclusively to between 1930 and 1960. However, I can't generalise from my own, individual experience of one care home.
If you care so much about seeing your elderly parent, why is he or she in a care home and not being looked after in your home, where you can see them every day? I can understand some people simply can't, due to the level of care required; however, the ones I see complaining on TV appear staunchly middle class and look reasonably well off. I get a whiff of the 'I know my rights' argument - or am I generalising?
What I do detest is the process of transferring mum's house to the children, so as to say she had no assets, and then getting the state (i.e. you and me) to pay the cost of residential care. That's basically benefit fraud. From experience, it can cost upward of £3k a month to keep a parent in a residential home, which is a great incentive to have your mum or dad living at home, unless of course, you've transferred mum's house into your name, when the poor old taxpayer foots the bill and you get to keep the inheritance, which many see as their right - which is wrong.
No comments:
Post a Comment