First experiences

This blog is all about my experiences and thoughts on the heath care system in this country. Through the years I have had a wide and very variable set of experiences of the way health care, for the elderly, seriously ill and disabled is delivered and, despite all the changes and initiatives through those years, have found the way the care has been delivered to be disturbingly variable and idiosyncratic in its effectiveness. 

I suppose I first came across the disturbing side of health care when I visited, in my early teens and with my parents, an elderly neighbour who had needed to go into a nursing home. She and her family were affluent and so costs were not a limitation, the place was a grand looking house somewhere near Marlow, and we drove down in her family's grand old car, a stately Rolls Royce. So imagine the shock of seeing her in what appeared to be a crowded and hastily arranged dormitory with no privacy for her and, as far as I can remember, no furniture or area to call her own or keep her things. It was a long time ago and so my memories of it are limited, but I remember that my parents were shocked and I felt as though I had entered a very different world from the one I was used to.

Next was a similar but scarier experience when visiting the grandmother of a girlfriend when the old lady had had a fall and been temporally admitted to a geriatric ward in a London mental hospital, apparently the only place that could be found for her at short notice by her local hospital. Entering the grounds we skirted a building that looked like an old workhouse, and probably was, with bars at the windows, people faces pressed to the windows, waving and shouting from open windows. The building the grandmother was in looked like a large converted wartime timber framed barrack block and was populated by a lot of elderly people in all states of health and mental capacity wandering around. The grandmother looked frightened and her daughter quickly got her moved to somewhere calmer quieter and more acceptable, though it was not an easy task.

And finally, for this post and part of my story, is the experience of visiting my first wife's brother in various nursing homes/institutions specifically set up to care for children who were severely physically disabled and mentally challenged. Here we are talking about the early 70's and the places were disturbing and scary and felt like some updated version of a Victorian world that Dickens would have torn into. There were high metal fences around them, a fair amount of chaos and intimidation in and between the residents, and it felt like visiting some particularly institutionalised form of hell. For him, he was in his late teens when I first met him, better things were to come, but his severe cerebral palsy had condemned him to a lifetime thus far in such places.

All of these places and what they were like was well hidden away from view and I would have known nothing about their existence or what they were like if fate had not taken me to them. As you might imagine such experiences made some big impressions on me and gave me a back stop to make judgements against, as to what was right or wrong with the provision and my attitude to care for the vulnerable. Those places and images live with me still and were far worse than I have the words to describe.