Care for the elderly

We currently have a situation in which an elderly lady home from hospital via a respite care home is unable to cope. It is true that she needs a lot of care and the social services have appointed a care agency to send in someone four times a day. Unfortunately these people, some of whom are clearly caring, are too rushed to do a proper job. They do not arrive early enough to get the lady out of bed and to the toilet, and they leave her with her breakfast but without removing the tray on her trolley to allow herself to attempt to get to the bathroom. During the day they do not ask if she needs to go to the toilet or take account of the fact that as she is confused she may not be able to ask. They do not ensure having disposed of one incontinence pad that they have given her another. You can imagine the result of such a failure. They do not ensure she has taken her medication and in general they are not doing their job.

The lady is frightened to be left on her own, mainly because she is not offered enough opportunities to get to the bathroom, and in her most lucid moments has asked if we can find her permanent care, which we must do because we cannot be there for her every minute of the day, and because we cannot ensure that the care provided by the agency through the social services is even adequate, let alone good.

How does she get to find a permanent care home? Apparently we need a broker, who has visited, but it takes time. We haven't got time, though my wife spends many hours a day with her. The lady is frightened and vulnerable now. To get interim respite care apparently we need another broker but she doesn't answer her telephone, any more than the care agency did this morning after another serious failing.

Why does it all take so long to get anything done? If there is a shortage of staff perhaps they could tell us. Could they give us a timescale? How many agencies do we need to get an old lady some comfort?

When we thought the lady might be able to manage at home we asked about a bath lift and were told the wait was five months for her to be assessed. This about gives the flavour of the situation. I am not apportioning blame. I do not know who is to blame because no one is taking responsibility apart from us except a couple of volunteers who shouldn't have to.

Gordon Brown said last Thursday in the Sky News leaders' debate “Now when we look at the needs of pensioners it is absolutely true to say that we need help with urgent needs, social care in the home and that is what we are introducing over the next few months so that people don’t have to go in to old people’s homes if they want to stay at home, they can get the home helps and the health visitors that are necessary for them so that they can have comfort in their own homes.”

It is a pity that as of now, our elderly lady has not been afforded any dignity by the social services and agencies that are supposed to help. She has no confidence left to allow her to stay at home even if it were a viable option.

Have you experience in this area? What do you think?

Studies in human nature

Sometimes we have abilities of which we are unaware, especially when young. Mind you, I can hardly claim to be multi-talented. I wish I could draw and paint, but never had the know-how.

In my professional life, as a junior employee I pretty much did I was told, including making the tea and coffee, but that was the office junior's lot along with putting away everyone else's files. There was not much engagement with clients which was left to more senior people, and it was not until I took on more responsible roles that I met clients face-to-face.

As soon as I did, I started in the professional sense to learn the art of people watching. Of course my elders would tell me their opinion of clients, their attitudes and preferences and whether they were to be trusted. This was long before we had to worry about Money Laundering Regulations and the like. It was simply whether clients could be relied upon to tell the truth. I learned to gauge professional clients but somehow never transferred this to my personal life.

I don't know why it never dawned on me that a “nose” for understanding different characters in the people I met could not be translated into one's personal life. It took the devastating shock of being deceived in love back in the eighties to shake me out of an ignorant complacency, though after that I had some years of being deeply suspicious of the motives of many people I met on a social basis.

Over the years, though, I have been more relaxed about these matters, which is fortunate since otherwise I would not have eventually been more lucky in love. I do find it quite easy from having met people a few times to know exactly how they think; whether they are really friendly or just pretending, whether they are generous or mean, how they are likely to react in a given situation and therefore how to avoid offending them.

I guess that I have a talent for empathising and putting myself in other peoples places with their mindsets. That is really useful in business, but golly, it is so brilliant in “normal life”. I wish I had known how this worked when I started out in my adult life.

Resurrection

"Flotsam" is so far put together from a collection of old blogs I have left lying around in various parts of the web; hence the title. I am now consolidating and think I will try to make this my commentary on current mainly non-business events, or not about serious business anyway.

The previous entry about alleged lack of cooking skills is not current and fortunately my wife is not about to go into hospital. What is surprising is that some questions we asked five years ago we still have no answers for even though the man himself has been tackled formally on the subject. Mind you, maybe it's not that surprising. Ho-hum!

Let's see where this all goes; the blog that is, not the interrogation of our former Prime Minister. That's not going anywhere.

“I can’t cook”!

How often do we here people say “I can’t cook”? What a load of nonsense!

My wife is going to be laid up for a while, and for the first time in years, I have regained control of the kitchen. Gloria has a real passion for cooking, and it must be frustrating for her not to be sufficiently mobile to be able to do so. However, having been cooking again over the last two weeks, and most importantly, being in charge of the shopping and planning of meals, I have remembered how much I enjoy it too.

Whilst I was cooking today’s Sunday lunch (which was very good, even if I say it myself) I was thinking that those who say they cannot cook probably cannot be bothered or are simply impatient over timing or have no imagination.

I agree that to be a great cook, you might need both imagination and talent (which our own Fay must have), but anyone with a watch, a little patience and a clear half an hour must be able to cook a simple meal, surely? Are the “can’t cook brigade” the same people who tell you they cannot learn to swim, run a business on their own, maintain a relationship with a partner or learn a foreign language? Alternatively have I slipped into a coaching mode and perhaps need to lie in a darkened room with a cold compress?

Radio networking and the numbers game

A long time ago – actually about 25 years ago when I was very young – I was a very active radio amateur. I still have my licence, but am pretty much non-practising. Please understand this was not Citizen’s Band or CB, this was access to the amateur radio-allocated frequencies for “the self-training of the radio amateur” in the old-fashioned language used by the Government. Latterly, my call sign was (and is still) G4MCU.

At this juncture I would ask you to bear with me as it will take a little while to get to the point.

My interest was not so much in the electronics, but in radio propagation; that is, how the radio waves are carried over both short and long distances. Of course study of both the electronics and the propagation was necessary because we had a three hour exam to pass before we were let loose on the airwaves. It was not then multiple choice. We actually had to write something and draw diagrams using our initiative. Later I passed a Morse exam, proving I was able to send and receive at twelve words a minute.

Anyway, within the amateur radio fraternity we all had our particular interests. Mine was principally in understanding how radio waves could travel long distances at VHF frequencies and higher. Although I dabbled at 70 MHz my particular enthusiasm was at 144 MHz (2 metres), 432 MHz (70 cms) and 1296 MHz (23 cms). At 144 Mhz I was interested in radio propagation (getting and receiving signals) via tropspheric lower atmosphere means, via the Aurora Borealis, via sporadic ionisation of the “E” layer and via meteor scatter, using the ionised trails of meteors to reflect signals.

Anyway, I will not go into the means of doing this as this is not meant to be a technical article. What happened was that I got into a race to gain the most contacts with stations on 144Mhz over as wide an area and as long a distance as possible. My longest distance contact was over 2000km into the Ukraine, which was and still would be pretty fantastic via terrestrial means; that is without using the Moon to bounce signals off, and without using the artificial amateur radio satellites.

I climbed up the leagues of numbers of stations contacted over wide areas, and was in the top ten in the UK (no. 8 was my highest) and was in the top 100 in the all-Europe German run table.

However, despite the numbers, my true interest was in reading, understanding, and especially discussing with my fellow radio amateurs the science behind what we did, and how our results were achieved. There was and still is a lot which was not properly understood about these things and we felt needed in that Universities collated our information to look for patterns and explanations. In the meantime, we discussed our radio passions: how the weather made the lower atmosphere suitable for long distance communication, the way the Sun caused the auroras and the Sporadic E propagation (and solar activity in general), and the way the meteors reflected the signals, their relationship in some cases to comets and of course their timing. We made great friends and learned from our peers, but actually the numbers of stations we contacted were not really important. Often we did not know the names of those contacted in the numbers game. Certainly they never meant much to us unless they were famous in the radio world for their achievements.

What it boiled down to was that the numbers could just consume one. It was like a gambling addiction in that we just wanted more and could forget what was important, including our family and friends. The numbers became a distraction from the people one could value who were hidden behind the numbers, and in many ways those whom we really knew could be forgotten in the pointless pursuit of contacting ever more people and stations we would never cross paths with again.

Anyway, I thought of this upon landing on a business networking site home page and noticing that my “ranking” has slid down due to my failure to play the numbers game, because I do not know well enough (though I am working on it) the people in my network whom I truly value, and because I like to connect with people who want to connect with me, the individual, and not just as another number. There is no substitute for relationships, and for sharing our experiences and knowledge, is there?

© Jon Stow 2007

Compassion

To me the word “compassion” implies an empathic understanding of the suffering of another and thus is a step beyond pity, which nevertheless is a sympathetic appreciation of another’s plight.

It is perhaps not too difficult to understand the anguish of those with whom we are not acquainted. If we see news footage of a starving child or hear about victims of the Asian tsunami of course we feel emotion. However, unless there is any direct involvement (where for instance someone we know was killed or bereaved) we might perhaps send a charitable donation but we are otherwise unable to help in a practical sense and do not become greatly engaged emotionally.

Sometimes, though, it seems to us that someone we know has been seriously wronged, or we have a deep sense of injustice or sympathy for that person’s anguish. If that person who is our friend or colleague has been deeply hurt or is vulnerable, we are anxious to rush to that person’s side, to help fight the battle. That is a very noble and honourable thing to do and it will be helpful to the person wronged to know that he or she has the support of others through a difficult time.

Nevertheless, often in human relationships there are two sides to every story. That does not mean that the person wronged is in any way to blame, but perhaps the behaviour of the supposed perpetrator has to be seen in the context of his or her own situation and probably that person’s emotional state. That person should not be demonised and it may be that that person requires some understanding too, indeed some compassion; an empathic understanding as to why the person acted in the way that he or she did. Perhaps the wrongful act was an accident or a simple indiscretion under stress (if it was a criminal act then that is for another discussion another time), and in some circumstances it might have been a cry for help.

These situations occur in online relationships too, and of course it is very likely that they will affect people’s daily lives. Compassion for the “wrongdoer” does not require us to agree with someone’s actions but if we make an effort to understand the circumstances it may assuage our anger.

My Oxford Pocket Dictionary defines compassion as “pity inclining one to spare or help”. Online or offline, it is always important not to rush to judgement, but to help and support the parties involved and show compassion to all those who need it.

© Jon Stow 2005

Questions Mr Blair never answered

With roughly a week to go to the General Election only about a week away I am completely mystified as to why Mr. Tony Blair is still the incumbent Prime Minister and Leader of the Labour Party.

Let us remind ourselves once again that Mr. Blair took this country to war with Iraq on the basis that Saddam Hussein was prepared to deploy weapons of mass destruction within 45 minutes. He may have come up later with the idea that removal of this cruel regime was necessary in a wider context, but nevertheless the country and Her Majesty’s Opposition were sold on the WMD issue. The Conservative Party did not just “go along with it” as Charles Kennedy said on the radio this morning; the leadership believed as many of us did that the Government had proof of the existence of these weapons.

Subsequently it emerged that the supposed WMDs were in the form of shells fired from field guns, and the intelligence community had not suggested to Ministers that they were missile-borne and capable of reaching Israel and Cyprus as had been reported by some newspapers.

The Prime Minister then let us know that he did not realise that the alleged WMDs were not missile-borne. Why on earth he did not ask for details from his Defence Secretary and the military intelligence officials? Should not any political leader of a nation make sure that if he is to take the country to war he has been fully briefed on the enemy’s military capabilities? Surely Mr. Blair should have asked his advisers for the fullest justification of his causi bellum.

Lord Carrington resigned from the Government in 1982 over his Foreign Office’s failure to get wind of the Argentinians’ invasion of the Falklands, bearing the responsibility for his Ministry’s failure even though he was not personally responsible for an error of judgement. Of course, Lord Carrington was and is a man of honour. Our Prime Minister led the country to war on false pretences and failed to establish basic facts or even the detail of current intelligence (correct or otherwise) concerning Iraqi weaponery. The British people should ask themselves what this says about Mr. Blair before casting their votes next Thursday.

© Jon Stow 2005

Mobile madness

My wife gets stuck in a queue of traffic. There is a car parked right at the top of a T junction and everyone has to ease past gently whilst watching for traffic turning in. The young lady driver of the car has stopped to answer her mobile as she does not have a hands-free kit.

I get held up on a main single carriageway road, very busy during the rush hour. Traffic is filtering past a Jeep type vehicle. The male driver is taking a phone call and has just stopped where he was. I think to myself that I would not spend my money on the vehicle he has splashed out on (though he has gone partially off-road in that the nearside wheels are on the pavement), but I did spare a few pounds for my hands-free kit, which was quite cheap.

And then I am about to drive past a row of parked cars. There should be room to pass even though there is a car coming the other way, but he is leaving me no room to pull out, so I have to wait. He has the phone to his right ear and acknowledges my courtesy by taking his left hand off the steering wheel to wave.

Some people seem to disregard totally the current law, never mind thinking about safety or consideration for other motorists. Or am I the one out of step?

Then again…

As I was driving home tonight in dry clear conditions, various people who clearly need sight tests have their fog lights on. Alternatively they may need brain tests.