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,
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?’
7:30AM BST 26 Mar 2012
Andrew Lansley, the Health Secretary, said there was a “moral imperative” to diagnose sufferers earlier so they could receive better treatment.
The announcement comes as David Cameron warns today that the dementia crisis facing the country is on a par with high rates of HIV and cancer in previous decades.
