Elderly care

In one of my earlier posts, I bemoaned the fact that my parents are having to sell my grandmother's home to pay for her nursing care. Today I read Dr Crippen's article about Liz Penny and her experiences looking after her demented mother. I'm feeling guilty now. Thinking about it, it's a bit greedy of me to expect the taxpayer to fund my grandmother's care when she's got all that money tied up in a house she's not living in. Or is it? Why shouldn't our welfare system provide decent care for our elderly, if that is what we so wish? The problem, of course, is funding. So many things to fund out the public purse, and we have to draw the line somewhere.

Dr Crippen points out that Pakistani families look after their elderly, why shouldn't we? Well, Pakistani families tend to be closer and larger, so there's more people to share the load, so to speak. Another thing is that the generation gap in the last couple of generations has increased, such that people are increasingly finding that their parents need help when they themselves are still looking after children. Ok, a lot of these things are to an extent self-inflicted. But calling people scroungers isn't helping. There may be lots of reasons why people can't look after elderly relatives themselves. Some of these reasons may be selfish, but there's no reason why we as a society can't build a framework for decent care for our elderly citizens. One that doesn't involve guilt-tripping, but also doesn't involve dumping the old dears in a home and forgetting about them.

And me? I think I've got to make an effort to see Grandma more often. It may be an excuse, but she's not the intelligent, witty, wise woman she was only a few years ago, which makes it harder.