Old left high and dry

And can only get worse as cuts to Social Care continue. Surely this must have been blinking obvious when the cutbacks started!

My mum has complained for years that the powers that be look at your age first and then decide if they will attempt to help esp in the NHS.

Very true. If you are over 65 it seems healthcare starts to be rationed.

I'm 68 and over the past three years have had easy access to the best health care treatment available all on the NHS - my treatment could not have been better had I been half my age.

My mums healthcare has been fine too I think. She hasnt needed much. I do wonder if her couple of minor operations would have been done quicker if she was years younger, but I dont think so?

I think there is a certain amount of scare-mongering going on in the press and by some politicians about this. My DSiL is a consultant in an NHS hospital and he says that there is certainly no formal or informal policy to treat any age group less favourably than any other.

It is sometimes a clinical judgement that an older patient would not cope with a particular treatment or operation and perhaps that needs to be explained more clearly.

The fact is that there are huge and increasing demands on an NHS that was never designed to cope with all the modern drugs and treatments that have developed over the years. We are still very lucky to have such dedicated, professional and able medics to treat us. They will never be able to satisfy everyone, especially the "I want it now" generation.

I think there is a lot of scaremongering too, but doctors do make decisions. An 85-year old family friend has just had a successful triple heart bypass just before Christmas. But I also know of a diabetic friend who refused to controller her condition, lost a leg, ended up on dialysis and was not put on the kidney transplant list. She died aged 42.

Doctors sometimes do have difficult decisions to make.

That's a very interesting post Gagagran. The fact that it is the availability of all the modern drugs and treatments, and the huge cost of them, that makes the NHS so expensive to run.

There is an awful lot written about how pensioners have been protected from the ravages of the last few years economic problems, and state pensions, with their bells and whistles have.

But older people who are ill, disabled and vulnerable have suffered very badly from the cuts in social care and those who are dependent on Social Services for their residential care fees have particularly suffered as SS have held down the rate they are prepared to pay and put vulnerable people in homes prepared to accept these people but in conditions and with care that most of us would consider completely unacceptable.

I am 69 and, as many of you know, have had six months or so of superb treatments and operations with the NHS. I cannot praise the NHS here enough, at every level.

The absence of good social care has been a problem for a very long time - I left SSD 20 years ago nearly and it was a problem then. It is quite simply underfunded - end of.

Gagagran

I agree with your post.

At the risk of 'here she goes again'. My father had excellent care from both the NHS and Social Services. He died 2 years ago this June. He was 94 years old, had dementia onset and osteoporosis. He died in Leicester Glenfield Hospital after having a Pacemaker fitted!!!! The point being his age was absolutely no bar from receiving neither appropriate NHS health care nor Social Services care. He was living in his own home and I will be eternally grateful for the service both he and our family received.

What I find so annoying about this scenario is Social Services are being cut 'fact'. Funding is being cut 'fact'. Then if you look at councils financial accounts some of those shouting loudest are holding huge sums of money in their bank accounts. Then you look at what they have spent their money on and you could cry. The bigger the council, the more cash it 'sits on', the bigger it shouts, the more I wonder how do they get away with it.. Councils up and down the country are to my mind not prioritising their spending and this is being unspoken of. Why I wonder. Is it politics at play? I think there are a lot of concerns with funding for Social Care from the government, yes but there are other parties who should be made to account for their actions too.

I may be way off. But are councils not doing so much about social care because the people that make the decisions are themselves younger? So they themselves are more concerned about say roads for example?

Not around here, they're not! You need a 4x4 just to drive down the road with all the potholes!

There was something about this on R4 today - it would seem that the problem is in part explained by lack of ring-fencing of the money received from central government and intended for social care.

Social care, if done properly, is expensive. Carers have a tough time with 15 minute slots allocated sometimes and that often includes travelling time - they must be worn out - and they don't get paid much.

Councils are not doing much about social care because the government has cut their money every year since they came to power, soontobe.
The research is AgeUK, by the way, so presumably believable.

Mishap, my husband died three years ago tomorrow. In the last three weeks he had carers in four times a day, organised by the local hospice. They were on minimum pay, and worked in pairs, and were only supposed to be here for 15 minutes. I quite often used to ask them for help so they could stay a bit longer. There was no way they could have done what they had to do properly in 15 minutes.

There used to be geriatric wards and even geriatric hospitals in the past, these were closed as it was found that much of the care was social care which could be taken care of in the community. Now there have been huge cuts in community care, and guess what one of the problems in hospitals are the number of elderly who can't be discharged because of the lack of care in the community. You couldn't make it up.

for tomorrow durhamjen -I will be thinking of you on your sad anniversary. Will you have someone with you or do you prefer to be alone with your thoughts and memories?

From me too durhamjen.

Thanks, Soutra and Mishap. I am going to my son and his family after school, after I have been teaching my grandson all day, so I will not be alone most of the day. However, my husband died at ten to midnight, and I assume I will be back here then, unless it's too icy to walk back, in which case I can easily stay there. Our son was with me when he died; my husband delivered his son.
Thanks for caring.
Last week my grandson said he wanted to look at videos of granddad. I'll see if he remembers.

Precious memories-guard them well.

Some one mentioned geriatric wards on here.I remember long stay wards in my early days and while I realise they were expensive to run they did serve a need at the time. Last October a neighbour of mine was diagnosed very late with a brain tumour,he was 82. Within a few days of diagnosis,when given approx 2 months his partner was pressured to move him to a care home. She was given no help and no guidelines.She was in a state of shock from his diagnosis and "rushed" him into a care
home where he died after 4 weeks and 5 days and which cost £2800. I thought this was callous and uncaring.

I should add here he was sent to A&E as the GP thought he had had a slight stroke and he never came home again. I just thought it was so sad.

That's terrible, annsixty. My husband died four months after being diagnosed with a brain tumour. He was sent to hospital after having tremors, which the GP thought was a stroke. He was going to be sent home before having a scan, as the doctor thought it was something to do with his ataxia. He hadn't even bothered to read the letter the GP sent.
After the scan, he was still sent home until another hospital rang up for him to go and have an operation. After that, he never wanted to go in hospital again, and he was looked after at home until he died.
The difference was that we were younger, could argue our corner and had an understanding GP. He had also written an advance directive, just in case he wasn't capable of telling people what he wanted.

I agree that it was a callous way to treat the couple. One reason was possibly because of the financial situation in which the NHS and social care find themselves now. However, I thought that if someone was given less than six months to live, they were automatically given DLA, or its new equivalent. Also, someone in that state should get 100% funding.

I notice that the DH has said it has given an extra £1.1 billion to councils this year to help protect social care services, in response to the Age UK review.

"Council funding is being cut by £11.3 billion

The "formula grant" is the main grant paid to councils by the government: under it, for every £1 received by councils in 2010/11, they got just 73.6p in 2013/14. This is before the effects of inflation are taken into account.

In total the government plans to slash grants to councils by £11.3bn by 2015/16.

More than 500,000 council workers have lost their jobs since 2010."

This is from an article on an austerity website.