I HAD a meeting with the Barnsley Hospital chiefs last week – fourteen months after my mum died there.
As many of you know, I have been in a state of trauma since and I’ve been asked so many times how I am, how things are that I felt duty bound to write this.
Mum didn’t have the care she should have but please note, this is not a post that seeks to carry on my grievances.
The best thing I can hope for is that lessons really have been truly learned and – this is the more important bit – acted upon by what happened to my family and I came out of the meeting feeling listened to and assured, and trust me my BS radar was tweaked up to max and I was primed to sniff it out.
I am indebted to all the people in the room for their frankness and accountability.
It can’t undo anything but the weight has shifted in my chest, the anger has begun to finally fade and only when you let it drop do you realise how heavy the burden has been.
I want to lay down the drum I have been banging because the least any of us should expect is that basics are covered in hospital and by that I don’t just mean being fed and watered, but dignity, respect, especially important for a frail, old person because often it is one of the few things they have left intact.
At nearly 92, mum’s first duties of every morning were to have a strip wash, brush her hair and put on her jewellery.
She was so much more than just a confused little old woman at the end of her life.
So it is important that the medical side marries its clinical findings with what we know the baseline of our frail to be.
But there are some – and they are always going to slip through the net – who treat the frail like a sub species at best, a different breed at worst.
Why such people pick a caring profession is beyond me but thankfully they are rarer than the good eggs and mum was shown a lot of kindness and care in hospital. For instance, the frailty clinic, as the name might suggest, treated her with kid gloves.
But the negative instances are always going to cause the most bruising, their impact last the longest.
I am glad I spoke out, I am glad that I met with the hospital chiefs because I don’t think I would ever have been able to rest otherwise.
It’s not easy to speak up when you are your weakest and need to be at your strongest, but it is the only way that anything will alter if it needs to.
I would have regretted my silence, I would never have found my peace and I hope it means that any changes made, and to be made, really will make things better. I think it will, I have to have that faith.
If I were a tech giant well on my way to being a trillionaire, I would feel more duty-bound to do something about controlling social media than I would be on blowing my dosh on rockets.
Our youth are crumbling, kids are killing kids on a daily basis. They are desensitised to porn and extreme violence at stupidly young ages.
Tech giants can pull the plug on information available when some celeb pays enough money to have a press blackout so why can’t they block sensitive content as easily? The time is well overdue to get this out-of-control dog on a leash before society totally implodes. That is surely more important than finding out about the depth of craters on Mars.
