An increasingly influential advocate for older people is emerging from an unlikely direction: the billion-pound business that is synonymous with leisured middle-class retirement.
Ros Altmann is director-general of the Saga Group. She has been recruited specifically to be “the voice of the over-50s” and the past fortnight has been typically busy for Altmann, commenting on, among other things,
Tuesday, 27 March 2012
Children being cared for by family and friends who are not their parents are being let down by local authorities, a charity has said.
Family Rights Group has conducted research with Oxford University’s Centre for Family Law and Policy which, it says, shows “a major lack of support” for “kinship carers”.
The organisation says there are estimated to be 250,000 children living with family or friends in situations where they are unable to live with either of their parents for whatever reason. It found almost 44% of those surveyed said they had received no practical help from their local authority.
The charity said 95% identified at least one form of support they had needed but not received and more than 70% rated the support they had received from their local authority as poor or very poor.
By Sophie Borland and Jason Groves
PUBLISHED: 21:01, 25 March 2012 | UPDATED: 23:24, 26 March 2012
David Cameron was yesterday forced to admit that NHS nurses lack compassion after being confronted by former Strictly Come Dancing judge Arlene Phillips.
The 68-year-old told the Prime Minister how she had witnessed nurses walking past dementia patients ‘as if they didn’t exist’ when visiting her mother-in-law in hospital over Christmas.
And she revealed how the 84-year-old, who does not suffer from dementia, had been kept on the same ward in Hereford Hospital as several Alzheimer’s patients, many of whom were ‘repeatedly calling out for nurses’.
Mrs Phillips, a supporter of the Alzheimer’s Society, who has spoken movingly in the past about her father’s battle with dementia, claimed ‘every nurse in that ward walked up and down as if they didn’t exist’.
Confronting Mr Cameron during a question and answer session at a conference in London yesterday, she asked: ‘How will you train nurses to care?’
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