The Kettle's Boyled: Hurry up and die, we want your house
There is a growing narrative nowadays that older people are somehow privileged, living high on the hog on big pensions and in houses they bought for a handful of old money back in the day.
Recent TV programmes on elder abuse in a small number of nursing homes across the country shocked most of us. A friend of mine is well known at international level for his support of the rights of people with disabilities to live in society, and he has worked hard for decades to get policy-makers away from the notion that anyone with a disability should be locked away in an institution for the ‘crime’ of being less able or differently able from the rest of the population.
In a conversation just a few months ago he mentioned to me that the biggest cloud on the horizon may not just be the mistreatment of people with disabilities but the institutionalisation of older people, often in commercially-driven large institutions operated solely for profit motives.
It's subtle, sometimes, that societal shift away from people-centred policies to what is simply just profitable. There is a growing narrative nowadays that older people are somehow privileged, living high on the hog on big pensions and in houses they bought for a handful of old money back in the day when apparently everyone could buy a house if they just went off the drink for November. We hear suggestions that older people should consider downsizing, leaving the homes they put together over decades and going to live in a small council flat somewhere, away from their communities. They could then just hand over their houses to people who feel entitled to them. And when they get a bit feeble, sure it’s just a short stumble to the nearest institution, run by a multinational conglomerate where they can sit around a day-room with a hundred strangers while the accountants compete to see how many slices they might get from a lump of turkey once they just find a slightly sharper knife.
There are good and bad nursing homes, and lots of mediocrity in between. Even the best of them struggle with staffing levels, trying to get more appropriate numbers to cover busy periods and competing for staff with better paid jobs, but do even the good places meet our societal need? Should there be a better model, based maybe on own door, spaces in purpose-built centres, only retaining the institutional model for people in need of intensive medical care? Are we just doing it badly in some cases and well in the rest, or are we doing it wrong altogether?
With a population living longer and more and more people needing some level of care at some point, why are we not having a conversation about this? Not just a footnote when somebody uncovers elder abuse for a TV programme, but as part of our conversation around the kind of society we want, including the kind of future we want for our older people? After all, that’s where we are all headed, at the end of the day.
