Thank you for replying. I totally agree. MH was written off as soon as Alzheimers was mentioned. It is hard for nursing staff to cope with people with dementia in ordinary elderly persons wards as their tendency to wander around and their need for extra help puts a strain on the staff.Absolutely disgraceful, Sandy. The problem with poor care is that it goes on over a period of time and so everyone involved can ‘pass the buck’. Your experiences do point to something of wider concern: the patient history is not correct if the board says that your father is self-feeding when he can’t feed himself. Who recorded this and how did s/he reach this conclusion? Having enough to eat and drink is a basic part of recovery from illness / an accident / an operation and yet we’ve heard for years about frail elderly patients becoming malnourished because food is left for them on a tray and they can’t eat it.
In this Covid era I find it interesting that an 80 year Covid patient (well, a patient of any age) can have all the resources of the NHS thrown at him / her to cure and rehabilitate him / her but very basic things such as making sure that a PWD eats and drinks, is taken to the toilet and kept clean cannot be done for a PWD. Why is that?
I certainly think that there is a training issue. I watched one health care assistant try to move my elderly friend from the bed to a wheelchair. She didn’t seem to know how to go about it at all. Isn’t patient transfer part of basic knowledge?
Perhaps the NHS should just be honest and say that it doesn’t want to treat the frail elderly / people with dementia and that they should not be brought into hospital because they are likely to leave in a poorer state than that in which they arrived.
There should be designated dementia wards with properly trained staff who choose to be there or , wherever possible, be given the medical help they need at home.