Despair and anger

Sometimes I despair of humankind and how we deal with each other and look out for each other. It's always been the same. I've always felt like this --- even as a child. Now I'm a 'grown up' my despair has broadened when I see how we attempt to care for each other through the various services that we have set up as a society --- the NHS, Social Services, Education, Mental Health, Crime and Policing. I despair, not because I think the people 'on the ground' --- who do the actual face-to-face work, are inept but because all the well meaning procedures, paperwork and planning gets in the way of proper, responsive, person-to-person caring.

In the last few days there have been incredible, painful, stories about the attempts of local and national services to provide care for vulnerable children. They have been found severely lacking (an understatement). If common sense had been allowed to prevail a child might be alive today and being cared for by people who are capable of such love and nurturing

In the last few days I have met a friend who's mother has terminal cancer. My friend is beside herself because she is bringing up two children alone and lives 40 miles from her mother. She has tried and tried to access services to support her mother as she dies and found no help at all -- not from Social Services, not from the GP, not from Macmillan. No one seems interested in offering this dying woman the support she needs just in terms of personal care and help with the domestic routine. Apparently her mother doesn't fit into the right boxes. She slips between the 'safety net' of Services. Last week my friend and her brother were so desperate that they resorted to taking their mother to Casualty and begging for help. None was forthcoming.

When my own father was declining into that troubled ocean called Alzheimer's he only got some of the help he needed because I had worked within such Services and knew where to go, who to ask. He only got other help because my partner works in a similar area of work and knows how to use the system. When my mother was dying of cancer she only got what she needed because my partner and I worked tirelessly and doggedly to get her the help she needed. We begged and harassed and became a bloody nuisance until people responded. It shouldn't have to be like that.

In the last few days, the parent of a child in one of my children's class has been convicted. That child's family live on the 'wrong side of town'. They are a loving family but vulnerable -- very vulnerable. They were always vulnerable ---- even before this latest event. They are not bad people. They are troubled, unwell, uneducated, lost. The parent who is now left alone is incapable of managing alone for a whole variety of reasons. The Court made it clear that imprisonment would make things worse for the family but they convicted anyway and now they have moved that convicted parent to an Institution 60 miles away to a place where access via public transport is very difficult. There appears to be no support from Social Services and none from the mental health team. If appropriate support had been put in place before the 'incident' occurred that parent may never have reached a point where they would be involved in a criminal action. The family and the extended family is in disarray. They are falling apart and everyone knows about the whole sorry business because it was reported in detail with addresses and names in the local paper.

In the last few days our elderly neighbour fell and broke his pelvis. He had been having terrible pains in his spine and other joints but our doctor (for we share the same GP) had decided these were just to do with 'old age' and declined to do any tests. It now turns out our neighbour has osteoporosis which explains his pain prior to the fall and also explains, in part, why the break was so severe. Our GP could have investigated the neighbour's pain more conscientiously. He could have prescribed medication to prevent further deterioration (this has been going on for 3 years) but he declined to do so. There wasn't time and it's easier to put everything down to old age. If the GP had known about the osteoporosis he could have put in various aids about the house so my neighbour was less prone to falling...but he didn't. Now the neighbour's in hospital and the nursing staff are regularly forgetting to give him/help him with his hearing aid and so have resorted to shouting at him or getting cross when he doesn't seem to respond to their questions or requests. They've been telling him he'll have to wait when he needs the lavatory. They are overworked and understaffed. So far he has had two 'accidents' and is ashamed and embarrassed. It's nothing new. When I worked in a hospital for people with learning disabilities over 25 years ago it was well known that a certain member of staff would deliberately leave one old lady in her wheelchair right near the entrance to the lavatory but pretend to not hear her cries for help in getting to the loo.....so she would wet herself and he could come over and shout at her. He could have the power and enjoy her humiliation. Everyone knew. We just needed him to be caught....and he was......just desserts. But where does that kind of cruelty come from ?

I have no answers for all this. I only feel despair and anger: despair and anger at individuals within these Services who seem either to work without compassion and should never have been employed or are made to work to strict guidelines and procedures which don't allow for or recognize common sense and gut feeling.

Procedures, procedures....always the paperwork, the forms, the meetings and the middle management --- never the common sense. There are people at the 'coalface' who see the families, see the children, see the old people and their despair and pain and needs and KNOW how to respond because the relationship is based upon one human being to another without the wall of bureaucracy and the constant reflection back to budgets, timescales, productivity, certificates and more bits of bloody paper. Most people in the 'caring professions' are there because, by nature, they care. They are blessed with an innate ability to respond to others' needs and know what they have to do. If their voice was heard and they were allowed to act upon their common sense, I am convinced that lives would be happier, that lives could even be saved.