Irish-born businessman was shocked by what he discovered when making a TV show on the issue, writes MARK HENNESSY
MILLIONAIRE BUSINESSMAN Gerry Robinson’s father, Tony, who was suffering from dementia, died 15 years ago in a home for the elderly shortly after his family had reluctantly decided they could no longer look after him at home.
“Within a fortnight, he was gone. He just gave up and said, ‘bugger it’. It was a very difficult experience. It left me with a lot of feelings of guilt,” said Robinson, who has now produced a two-part television series on the care of patients with dementia.
The investigation took the Irish-born businessman, who previously helped to improve the management of a UK National Health Service hospital in Rotherham, to four elderly homes in the UK.
The experience left him shocked: “It was a pretty depressing experience. The quality of care, with some truly honourable exceptions, was average to poor. In some places, it was downright awful,” Robinson told The Irish Times yesterday.
The BBC2 programme comes as an official inquiry warned that one in six people in elderly homes in the UK are getting unacceptable care, adding that 4,000 homes and agencies responsible for 80,000 more people must improve standards.
One in three people in the UK will die with dementia, according to the UK Alzheimer’s Society, adding that 700,000 suffer from it. This will rise to one million by 2030 and to 1.7 million by 2051.
Some scenes in the programme, Can Gerry Robinson Fix Dementia Care Homes?, are disturbing. In one, a home manager describes her charges as “goldfish – they just go round and round and forget everything”.
In most of the homes, the elderly rarely if ever receive one-to-one attention and, Robinson said, they are left to “stalk the hallways, raging with frustration, repeating themselves over and over, while the staff talk over them”.
“These are people who did extraordinary things. Some were Spitfire pilots. Some drove tanks in the war. Some survived the Blitz in London. Some were nurses for 30 years. Some taught for 50 years,” he said.
Health and safety regulations conspired against offering patients stimulating care: “Some homes used to take residents to the seaside. But they don’t do that any more because they are afraid of breaching the rules. There is too much box-ticking.”
Dementia sufferers, he said, had lost their memory but not their ability to feel: “They feel joy, excitement, pleasure, pain, hurt, anger, loneliness or hopelessness and feel them intensely. This makes our duty of care to them vital.”
Yet they are left “in soulless rooms, bored, with nothing to do and with little personal contact”, and receive just two minutes’ one-to-one contact with nurses and care workers every six hours.
However, Robinson said he believed improvements were possible: “Of course you must get the medical treatment right and make sure the right drugs are delivered. But they need human contact more than anything else.
“Does it matter if breakfast is not served to everybody until 9.30am? No, it doesn’t. It matters that people sit down and talk to them about the memories that they do have, not give out to them about what they have forgotten,” Robinson said.
Too often, families are filled with guilt when they go to inspect a home and spend “time worrying about the colour of the carpets when they should be looking to see how much time staff spend with patients”, he added.