Esther Rantzen: basic needs of care home residents are not being met
Care homes are failing to meet fundamental needs of residents such as food and water, Esther Rantzen says
Care homes are failing to meet the basic needs of residents such as making sure they have food and water, Esther Rantzen has said, as she reveals her newly opened helpline has received hundreds of calls reporting abuse in its first week.
It comes after the Daily Telegraph disclosed more than 1,000 care home residents have died of thirst or while suffering dehydration over the past decade.
The television presenter described the figures as “horrifying” and suggested care home staff should be forced to participate in roll plays to understand what it means to be “confined to a bed” and “unheard and ignored”.
SilverLine – a helpline for older people modelled on ChildLine – has had 400 calls from older people reporting abuse since it launched a week ago.One call was from a woman who rang from the lavatory of her care home to say she did not have any food and the heating had been turned off.
The woman said she was too frightened to reveal her name but gave the name of the care home, allowing the charity to take action.
Rantzen said: “The figures are completely shocking and horrifying. It’s such a simple thing, the human need for food and water.
“The role of a carer is about empathy, compassion and care. Maybe everybody in training needs to be confined to a bed and given, real practical role play to understand what it’s like to be unheard and ignored.”
In total, the helpline has received 8,000 calls – five per cent of which related to abuse or neglect.
Rantzen added: “The only caveat that I would put in is that there are some stages in someone’s life where they really don’t want to take anything by mouth at all so there may be some medical reasons why someone was denied water.”
Elderly and vulnerable patients were left without enough water despite being under the supervision of trained staff in homes in England and Wales.
The Coalition has failed to improve the situation, with more people dying while dehydrated last year than when David Cameron took office, although the total was lower than the 2006 peak.
Charities called for an urgent overhaul in social care, saying that the general public would be outraged if animals were treated in the same way.
“How can we call ourselves civilised when people are left to starve or die of thirst? … It is an utter disgrace that they are ever left without the most basic care,” said Dr Alison Cook, a director at the Alzheimer’s Society.
Figures obtained by this newspaper under freedom of information laws found that 1,158 care home residents suffered dehydration-related deaths between 2003 and 2012. Dehydration was named as either the underlying cause of death or a contributory factor, according to analysis of death certificates by the Office of National Statistics.
Some 318 care home residents were found to have died from starvation or when severely malnourished, while 2,815 deaths were linked to bed sores.
The real figures are likely to be far higher because residents who died while in hospital were not included.
Campaigners said the disclosures raised serious concerns about the way vulnerable elderly people were treated and why the Government had failed to decrease the numbers dying of thirst after more than three years in office.
Dot Gibson, general secretary of the National Pensioners Convention, said the care system needed an urgent overhaul.
“It is not good enough for ministers or the care regulator to talk about making improvements by 2015 when, in the meantime, older people are dying from neglect.
“The public would be outraged if animals were treated in the same way – we need to show the same compassion when it comes to caring for our elderly loved ones,” she added.
Earlier this year a coroner found that neglect by staff at a Birmingham care home contributed to the death of Norma Spear, 71, who lost 35lbs in five weeks while suffering from dehydration.
Her daughter Carol Clay said she was shocked by the level of dehydration deaths uncovered by The Daily Telegraph but feared that in 10 years’ time nothing will have changed.
The care system has been hit with a succession of scandals in recent years, with homes accused of systematic neglect and carers jailed for abusing patients.
Earlier this year a series of unannounced inspections by the Care Quality Commission, the health watchdog, discovered that vulnerable people in homes and hospitals were routinely denied privacy, inadequately fed or just ignored
The regulator heard staff dismissing elderly people as “lost causes” and forcing residents to use lavatories without doors. Around one in three homes inspected failed to pass any of the CQC’s five standards used to measure performance.
In 2011 a BBC Panorama investigation secretly filmed staff at Winterbourne View private hospital, near Bristol, hitting and taunting patients with learning disabilities. Six staff members were eventually jailed, while 19 patients are due to receive compensation. In October a coroner said that Orchid View care home, near Crawley, West Sussex, where 19 residents died, was riddled with “institutionalised abuse” and criticised the CQC for rating it as good in 2010.
Last year the CQC issued 818 warning notices to adult social care services in England – around two thirds more than the preceding year.
Jeremy Hunt, the Health Secretary, has said he will give the CQC “statutory independence” in an attempt to make the regulator more efficient, moving it on to a similar footing as the Bank of England.
Reacting to the findings, a Labour spokesman said that every elderly person “deserves the high standards of care that we would all want for our own mum or dad”. He added: “We will never get the care we aspire to from a social care system that has been stretched to the limit and cut to the bone.”
Norman Lamb, the care and support minister, said the deaths from thirst and starvation were “entirely unacceptable”.
He added that new CQC rules would allow it to intervene more effectively, and ministers would act to make company directors personally responsible for the care their organisation provides.
A spokesman from the Department of Health said that certain conditions make it extremely difficult to treat dehydration and malnutrition, such as dementia.
