Dear Care Quality Commission

Dear CQC,

As we approach the end of an old year and the start of a New Year and Decade, I have been considering the concept of ‘fool’s gold’ and also wondering whether it is worth trying to chase the real thing as far as dementia care is concerned.

Fool’s gold was always a common mineral, but then again .... isn’t that what we all are, as human beings? A base conglomeration of ... water, protein, fat, bones, minerals, more proteins, all contributing their own bits, and so on. Shaken and stirred, as the case may be.

A fool used to be defined as an idiot, someone who did not have the most basic abilities of understanding. A fool was also the joker, the jester, performing to order and destined to be mocked and ridiculed, hissed at and spat at and suffering scorn, scoffed at ad nauseam.

Is that really what we want today? Some people being called ‘fools’ and the equivalent of ‘fool’s gold’, just because they are different in some way from ourselves?

Does not dementia make some people different from others? Would we wish dementia to be defined in those same hideous terms? No.

Taken to the extreme, it would mean that anyone with dementia would also be defined as a pyrite.

No, that is not what a civilised society should wish for.

If we could banish from our vocabulary the word pyrite and the equivalents, then we may be able to open our minds to the fact that all that purports to be gold is not necessarily as golden as we may wish to find it to be. Nor is that which some might define as pyrite as foolish as they perhaps thought.

Many, most people posting here have come by the way of fools, in the health care services that they have been so desperate to contact for help. Some have never come the way of those same fools, because they have found genuine gold at the end of their own path, without even needing to make much effort. Some have found the most luxurious care for their own relatives, all paid for and free of charge. Good for them, and good for their relatives. They have been fortunate enough to find the golden nuggets strewn across their own path.

Others, however, find the equivalent of chipped concrete, but lacking the glue to stick the chips together into a solid base foundation. They then have to work out how to reform that concrete into a semblance of a golden nugget.

Is that what fool’s gold is all about? Does it mean that some find the gold, but others who find the chipped concrete are fools and required to accept that as the best that can be achieved for their own relatives? Not really. What it means is that you, CQC, have an awful lot of work to do in the New Year of 2010 to ensure that everyone strikes gold for their own relative, regardless of where they happen to live. Regardless of their particular connections, regardless of their own abilities.

Surely the central point should be the need for good solid = golden dementia care?

Happy New Year, CQC, and I wish you a 2010 that will allow you at last to understand the continuing struggles that many of us are still dealing with. Sparkling and gold-like? No. Of course not. Thanks to ..... .... ... you and others.