Have this week's events brought good news or bad for older
people?
By Rebecca Law, Media and PR officer
This was a good week for the millions of tons of
food that are unnecessarily binned each year. Now, instead, it's
the sell-by dates that are hitting the scrap heap.
Just as producers will no longer be able to mislead customers into
thinking their food is off, we got to thinking, isn't it time we
applied the same principle to older people too, who often, are
considered to have a sell-by date of their own?
Time and again, we see evidence of ageism and discrimination
across society. From the health service to the workplace, older
people are treated as though they have a shelf life. In fact, far
from being second-rate citizens, older people make a
disproportionately large contribution to society - their
volunteering alone was recently valued at £10billion a year and the
free care they provided to their grandchildren helps contribute
£4billion a year to the economy. They are a wealth of knowledge and
experience and they can, do, and want to continue making a valuable
contribution to society. So shouldn't we include a shift in the way
we label older people too?
This was a bad week for the Care Quality
Commission (CQC) after a Select Committee report claimed the
regulator in charge of inspecting hospitals and care homes had
"distorted" its priorities. The CQC has been focussing on
registering providers, which in turn, has led to a 70% drop in the
number of inspections it conducts to check care standards and
safety. The report states that some hospitals are not even visited
every two years if they are deemed to be low risk.
Perhaps then, we might be unsurprised by this morning's news, that
half our hospitals and care homes are failing to look after
patients. This is even further evidence of neglect of older people
in hospital wards and care homes and comes just months after
another CQC report, which found evidence of older people being
overlooked, left thirsty, or not given the assistance they need to
eat while in hospital. We have to ask ourselves whether children or
younger adults would ever be treated in this way. Ultimately,
though, this neglect damages not just the patients but the
healthcare system itself: poorer care means older people take
longer to recover and are more likely to be readmitted. And that,
in the end, will cost us all.
