Tag Archives: carer

High-tech home help

January 29, 2013   Carers, Older care

By Charles Laurence , Wednesday 23 January 2013

A new touch-screen system arriving in the UK this year (courtesy of Saga!)

promises to revolutionise old age. It helps to keep older people in their own homes for longer by enabling family or carers to keep a loving eye on mum or dad from afar. Here’s where it all began…
Simple medical information goes into the system too, such as blood pressure monitoring results.Simple medical information, such as a blood pressure reading, can be entered into the system.

At about the time that Michael Murdock began to worry about his mother’s approaching old age, his eye was caught by a stand at a high-tech trade show. It was called GrandCare Systems. Murdock was in business fitting ‘smart’ automation technology to expensive homes – his was a company you called when you wanted to be able to set the swimming-pool temperature from your car, or watch the front gate with hidden cameras. Amid the gizmos and trade tools at the show, GrandCare seemed to be offering something a little different.

‘I thought “Wow”,’ he says. ‘Here was a company with the sort of technology I use, but adapted to help me look after my mum!’

What it was offering was a way of watching over a loved one with a minimum of intrusion and a maximum of communication. And it was easy to use.

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Social care is bearing the brunt of council cuts

January 29, 2013   Carers, disability, ukcuts

Statistical manipulation disguises the fact that disabled people are being hit the hardest by cuts to benefits and services

 

Sally Bercow (centre) and Jane Asher (left) join protesters on the Hardest Hit march against cuts to disability benefits and services.

One of the extraordinary features of the cuts programme has been the fate of social care. At the same time as announcing the deepest cuts in public expenditure since the creation of the welfare state, there have been several pronouncements about extra funding for social care and how any failure to safeguard services for disabled children, adults or older people would be because of failings in local government.

For instance, the 2010 comprehensive spending review declared that there would be “£2bn a year of additional funding by 2014-15 to support social care”. However, a closer examination of these figures shows it was merely a statistical manipulation, achieved by closing one small funding stream, restarting it and then publishing the cumulative figure for a five-year period. The truth is very different.

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I love my disabled child – but I’d give my life to make her normal

November 28, 2012   autism, Carers, disability, ukcuts

The mother of a severely autistic girl makes a painfully honest confession

  • Meg Henderson writes a reply to Dominic Lawson who said he would never want to ‘cure’ his daughter from Down’s syndrome
  • Daughter Louise is brain-damaged and autistic and mother says disability took an ‘intolerable toll’ on the family
  • At 34, Louise is now settled in a special village in Fife where she receives dedicated care

By Meg Henderson

PUBLISHED: 00:59, 28 November 2012 | UPDATED: 10:13, 28 November 2012

Most nights, for more years than I can remember, I have had the same dream. I’m walking along the street, arm-in-arm with my beautiful, dark-haired daughter.

Her brown eyes are sparkling with joy, she’s chatting 19 to the dozen, making me laugh and giggle along with her. But every morning I wake to the same chilling reality. My 34-year-old daughter, Louise, is disabled.

Her speech can be almost unintelligible even to us, she will never hold down a job, have a family or even live by herself. Louise is a scared, anxious little girl imprisoned in a woman’s body.

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