Author Archives: Maureen
How un-fare: Sheffield OAP angry at bus pass swap
Pensioner angry at bus pass swap
A PENSIONER has hit out at an ‘anomaly’ which means disabled people in Sheffield lose an automatic right to free travel for their carer once they reach retirement age.
Sheffield Homes tenant board member Pat Molloy, of Heeley, has had his mobility pass replaced with a pensioners’ travel pass.
800,000 vulnerable elderly fighting to stay in their homes
Some 800,000 vulnerable elderly people are struggling to live in their own homes without any state-provided home help, say campaigners who argue the most vulnerable in society are being “catastrophically let down” by social services
By Stephen Adams, Medical Correspondent
6:30AM BST 16 Apr 2012
Councils have slashed spending on social care in the last few years, as Westminster has cut local authority funding.
Now more than four in five councils (82 per cent) will only fund home help for people with substantial or critical care needs, up from about half in 2005, according to official figures.
The result is that around 800,000 older people out of two million with care needs – many with dementia – are trying to live without any state-provided care, according to the charity Age UK.
It has joined forces with the British Geriatrics Society to lobby ministers for higher funding for social care services.
Anxiety: a very modern malaise
With 7 million tranquilliser prescriptions on the NHS, the nation is at the end of its tether. What’s to blame?
7:00AM BST 15 Apr 2012
Life was flying along for Zoe Brook. At 23, she had a fast-paced job she loved, in public relations, and had just moved into her first home with her then-partner. It was, she says, all that she had dreamt of.
That was until the night she sank to the floor, paralysed by fear, her own voice sounding muffled and as though on a time delay, while her view of the room darkened into the narrowest tunnel vision.
She thought she was dying. In fact, it was the start of an anxiety disorder that was to become her new reality, and to dominate her twenties. After finally sleeping, she awoke disorientated and petrified – a state that continued for more than three years, in which waves of panic attacks were “punctuated with glimpses of the real world”.
