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1. Big thread. Give it a read...
I work in a role positioned between health, social care and the private sector. I’m funded by the NHS and the council but I work for a housing provider. We assess for technology to support someone to remain at home and minimise their care needs.
I work in a role positioned between health, social care and the private sector. I’m funded by the NHS and the council but I work for a housing provider. We assess for technology to support someone to remain at home and minimise their care needs.
2. Luckily for me I’m not frontline staff, though I’ve worked throughout the pandemic. Demand on our service has dramatically increased as hospital discharges are sped up to clear space for increased admissions.
3. Despite not being frontline, we’re in an almost unique position to view an individual’s situation from a distance.
Here's an example of why the pandemic is causing the problems it is...
Here's an example of why the pandemic is causing the problems it is...
4. This week we arranged for technology to be fitted to support an elderly man due for discharge. He went in to hospital for non-COVID reasons: an injury caused from a fall after a period of confusion and instability which turned out to be a urine infection I believe.
5. Pretty much as soon as he got admitted to hospital he contracted COVID. Hospitals are the worst places to avoid contagious illnesses even if they are the best place to treat them. What should have been a short stay got complicated.
6. In the meantime, his wife suffered a stroke at home and was admitted to a different ward. He wasn’t allowed to visit her due to infection. Finally, when it was apparent she wouldn’t recover, he was allowed to go and say his goodbyes. She died shortly afterwards.
7. Meanwhile, no one has paid his rent while ill. The couple used to own their house outright – I believe purchased in the ‘Right To Buy’ boom. However, in recent years they’d sold the property to a company that specialises in freeing up equity and now rent it back from them.
8. In recent years the property had fallen into disrepair and they were being threatened with eviction anyway, before they ran up this debt too.
9. So here we are – discharging this man early to make space for new COVID admissions, to return to the home he has lived in nearly all his life but no longer owns, to care for himself for the first time ever, debts looming over his head in a time where he should be grieving.
10. Realistically, what’s going to happen here? Where’s the light at the end of this tunnel?
11. The pandemic doesn’t cause this storm of misfortune for someone, but it adds blockages and complications to a health and care process that was already stretched to the maximum before it came along.
12. It’s absolutely maddening to see people’s insular, selfish attitudes come out because they’re getting bored or the lockdown is stopping them doing things that are ultimately inessential.
13. Years of Tory rule have set this country up as a machine permanently hovering on the edge of collapse. Every vital public service is starved of money and forced to operate without contingency plans. Most people are one pay packet away from disaster.
14. All for what? Because some people don’t realise that their 80 years-or-so on Earth isn’t just a competition to acquire the most stuff? Has any rich person ever said on their death-bed “I’m so pleased I devoted my life to buying all this shit”?
15. The likes of Lawrence Fox and Van Morrison can only see this pandemic in a micro sense. It’s all about the immediate effects to them because they have money to navigate any wider impact without inconvenience.
16. But to anyone else it’s a stick in the wheel that reveals just how precarious and fragile this daft way of living has become and how it needs to change.
The irony of it all is that the man I mentioned probably voted the fuckers in.
/End
The irony of it all is that the man I mentioned probably voted the fuckers in.
/End
