DR MAX THE MIND DOCTOR: Cameras in every care home is the only way to stop abuse
When Betty Boylan’s family placed her in a Bupa care home, they must have thought they were doing their best for her. File pic
When Betty Boylan’s family placed her in a Bupa care home, they must have thought they were doing their best for her.
Betty, 77, has dementia and requires specialist care, which they assumed she would get at the Perry Locks Care Home in Birmingham. Instead, she was subjected to sickening violence.
This only came to light when the family became suspicious because of bruises on Betty’s body and placed a hidden camera in the room.
They caught 49-year-old carer Bina Begum grabbing the great-grandmother by the arm and pushing her back down in a chair. The force of the attack was so strong that Betty’s chair rocked back and forth.
A separate incident showed hairspray or deodorant being sprayed in her mouth by another carer.
I’m not just sickened but weary of this kind of abuse going on. It seems that not a week goes past without another tragic, enraging story surfacing. Something must be done — and urgently — to stop the neglect that is engulfing the most vulnerable people in society.
Despite admitting ill-treating and neglecting Betty at Birmingham Magistrates’ Court this week, Bina Begum escaped jail. She was fined £270 and handed a 12-month community order with 40 hours of unpaid work.
What a joke. Lenient sentences like this reek of ageism to me. If Begum had treated in a child in the same way, I doubt she’d have been let off with effectively a slap on the wrist.
If we are going to tackle the abuse of the elderly, we need to take bold steps to communicate to everyone that this will never be accepted.
Just as we acknowledge that teachers have a special place of trust in a child’s life and are therefore dealt with harshly when they breach this trust, we need clear legislation in place so that those looking after vulnerable patients will also feel the full force of the law — with no exceptions.
We owe it to the most vulnerable people in society to defend them. We need to send a clear message to everyone involved in the care of the elderly that abuse will not be accepted. Without this, many people would have no one to speak up for them.
And this leads me on to my next point. While I’m delighted that Begum was caught, the abuse she inflicted only came to light because Betty had a loving, caring family who became concerned.
How many other victims of abuse aren’t so lucky?
Betty, 77, has dementia and requires specialist care, which they assumed she would get at the Perry Locks Care Home in Birmingham. Instead, she was subjected to sickening violence
Organisations such as the Care Quality Commission (CQC), which are there to weed out abuse, are grossly ineffective.
In the absence of any meaningful way of assessing the actual quality of care, the CQC relies heavily on proxies. Their inspections focus on easily monitored criteria, such as how medicines are stored, policies around how complaints are handled and the number of sharps bins in clinical areas. An inspection is essentially an in-depth audit of the bureaucracy in a care home — how well it is playing the game.
That’s very different to assessing the actual quality of care. The only way they could do this is effectively to go undercover, and they don’t have the resources to do this.
However, it seems to me we have the answer to this problem already. The vast majority of these cases of abuse have been picked up by families placing video cameras in their relatives’ rooms.
I believe we should now start installing these cameras as routine. If we could put cameras in every room, abuse would stop practically overnight. We’d weed out the perpetrators and allow those who really care to get on with their jobs.
At the moment, people feel awkward about setting up cameras in a relative’s room. We need a culture shift so that it becomes perfectly normal.
We’d need to put in place appropriate safeguards as to who could see the footage, and be sensitive about how much of a resident’s personal living space was filmed, to protect the dignity of those being cared for.
Yes, this would be costly and I know that social care is currently in a financial crisis, but the price of small camera devices has come down dramatically in recent years.
The practice could begin in private care homes, with the cost being met by the owner or included as a one-off fee when someone moves in.
After a friend was burgled, I set up a small security camera, which cost about £140, in my lounge. This allows me to view live and recorded footage on my mobile phone. It took me less than five minutes to set it up and there are no running costs. It simply needs to be connected to wireless broadband.
It’s a sorry state of affairs when we have to put cameras in all care homes to protect our elderly, but we must end abuse and neglect once and for all.
How I'd end this health tourism mess
The issue of health tourism rages on, and rightly so. I’m grateful to the BBC documentary Hospital for continuing to highlight this in such an honest way.
This week’s episode showed a Nigerian woman who had gone into labour with quadruplets after landing at Heathrow in November. She racked up a bill of more than £500,000.
A woman from the Philippines had a quadruple bypass and ran up a bill of £59,000 before returning home. Neither woman has yet paid.
While it’s easy to wag our fingers and say we simply shouldn’t treat people unless we know for certain that they can pay, the programme shows how complex the issue is, telling patients’ heart-rending stories of life or death. It would be inhuman simply to kick acutely unwell patients onto the street.
The issue of health tourism rages on, and rightly so. I’m grateful to the BBC documentary Hospital for continuing to highlight this in such an honest way
But, for the sake of the NHS, we do need to address the issue.
It’s patently obvious that running after people with a credit card machine or sending invoices once they’ve gone home isn’t going to work. There’s just no incentive for people to pay.
We have a unique healthcare system in this country and, in order to protect it, we need to do three things.
First, before anyone can get through immigration controls, they need to be able to demonstrate they have medical insurance to cover them while they are here. Without this, they cannot enter. This has to apply to absolutely everyone who is coming to this country from outside of the EU, regardless for how long.
Second, anyone who, for whatever reason, evades paying and leaves the UK should be considered to have stolen from the NHS and be barred if they attempt to return. They will be stopped at the border and prevented from entering Britain until they pay their bill.
Finally, we need to aggressively pursue the monies owed to us from EU countries. The ‘gap’ in what we are owed and what we receive is estimated at £600 million a year. While we are playing by the rules and paying other countries the money we owe them, they aren’t, it seems.
I think we’ve all had enough of the NHS being used and abused by other nations.
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