Tag: politics

Kicking the caring can

Apr 25th, 2024

Grandma is ruthless. If you show any sign of weakness or illness, she starts talking about you in the past tense. She also has very little tolerance for people complaining about their issues, and grumbles every time the words ‘mental health’ are uttered on TV. Naturally, she is a massive diva when it comes to her own health in contradiction to her outwardly toughness. Does this remind you of anyone? You’d be forgiven for thinking my grandmother is the current UK Prime Minister.

Grandma’s inconsistent attitude also reminds me of the general view towards unpaid carers. On the one hand we’re selfless heroes, voluntarily devoting our lives to our loved ones, and on the other we’re benefit scroungers that don’t deserve a penny more than the pittance some of us currently get.

I hate to break it to you, but we’re neither of those things. We’re volunteers in the same way hostages are, we’re certainly not heroes, and we actually save the system billions of pounds. We are just normal people in tough situations that the majority of us will find themselves in at some point in their lives.

So why are we so disregarded? Even hated?

In short, because we represent what everyone fears. On a daily basis, we deal with death, illness, disability, poverty, old age, and stolen lives. That is our reality. How do people react to something they fear? They shun it, ignore it, and try to fight against it. That reaction is then institutionalised, the public at large don’t want to think about it so policies and governments don’t do anything about it. That means unpaid carers have the lowest-of-the-low benefits, no national strategy on how to support them, no focus on fixing the social care or health systems, and just generally pretending carers and caring doesn’t exist.

Some recent scandals have brought unpaid carers into the news agenda and there has even been a debate in parliament around increasing the carer’s allowance. All very welcome attention, and the debate highlighted the utter inaction around helping unpaid carers – a 2008 select committee report concluded the carer’s allowance was outdated and needed a complete overhaul, that was 16 years ago. Precisely nothing has been done since then, and the issues have predictably got worse. This neglect can be attributed to the government’s incompetence (obvs) but the problem is wider than that. Let me be blunt, it is the general public’s apathy that has enabled this.

Too harsh? I don’t think so, and it makes sense. In general, people don’t care about what doesn’t affect them. The challenge is making them see and understand that this uncomfortable issue *will* affect them.

As my friend Florian says, what to do? I think the answer for everyone is to get curious. Speak to the people in your life, your friends, neighbours, or colleagues and I guarantee you’ll find several people in your circle that are unpaid carers. Once you’ve heard their story and what they’re going through, you’ll start to care by proxy. You might even start thinking about what you would do in their situation and take an interest in how to improve the system for when your caring turn comes. Read the news stories, get involved, and put pressure on the powers that be so the caring can doesn’t get kicked down the road, again.

This may sound unrealistic, it probably is, but my morning coffee is making me optimistic. It’ll wear off in a bit.
Scareffolding

Mar 21st, 2024

Reading the news really isn’t good for me. I get too angry, and then have to write a rant about it. Lucky you, dear reader.

I read an article about a report MPs have done on adult social care in England. I already know the system is broken but I was curious to see what the MPs had to say about it. They didn’t hold back; you know you’re in real trouble when politicians are using words like ‘woeful’, ‘chronic’ and ‘underfunding’. The Department of Health and Social Care’s (DHSC) quote was predictably weak and said nothing to respond to the concerns raised. This is the part that got me angry – their lacklustre response to this report is indicative of their whole attitude towards this issue. They don’t seem to care, ironically.

Why can’t the UK government get social care and healthcare right or at least on the right track? For me, it is down to two things – breathtaking incompetence and / or lack of political will.

I would really like to understand why the idea of properly run and funded social care and health services is such a seemingly unimportant thing for the government. Surely, we deserve to be well cared for in our time of need? Why is this so tricky politically? Wouldn’t that be a legacy to be proud of? Maybe I’m too French on these things, but I get the feeling that social care is considered as a second class issue. Maybe because it is a difficult issue to think about if you’re not experiencing it directly? Is it correlated with weakness?

I understand the poisonous arguments made by some on people abusing the system and ‘profiting’ from the state, but in its current condition, I don’t think there is much to profit from. Unless you count certain baronesses, who seem to be experts in that area, if press reports are to be believed. And they allegedly made hundreds of thousands or even millions of pounds in profits. The DHSC is also very good at wasting money, writing off a cool 10 billion pounds in unused Personal protective equipment (PPE) during the COVID-19 pandemic. Imagine how many care workers they could have hired for that money, or how many care centres they could have opened.

It is on us to keep the pressure on politicians and to make our priorities clear. I don’t view this as a party political issue either, I don’t care who fixes it. It could be the left, the right, or the aliens-from-Mars party – as long as they do what is in our best interest. Currently, it feels this issue has been so politicised, it prevents (protects?) the government from having to act in a meaningful way; and the whole UK population loses. None of us can see doctors, dentists, or get the kind of medical or social care we deserve, need, and incidentally, pay for.

I almost got to the end of a blog post without mentioning unpaid carers but we are one of the biggest losers in the system, and paradoxically, one the main reasons it hasn’t completely collapsed…yet. We’re the scaffolding that holds the system up and we pay for it with our lives. We’re the scareffolding, if you will.

With an election coming up, it is time for all of us to think long and hard about what we want and who is best placed to make it a reality.
Go north and multiply?

Oct 5th, 2023

It’s only the middle of the week and I’m already furious. More than my usual baseline (see my blog on being fuelled by rage here.)

I’m furious about a statement a moronic minister has made at a recent political conference. He suggested that people in the UK should have more children so that they can care for the rising ageing population. I read the article, which made me even more mad, he is also considering cutting the number of care visas because they’re not considered ‘high skilled’ enough.

To recap, he wants us to have more kids we can’t afford, cut down the number of care workers even more, and expect us to care for our elders for free. I’m not sure who this message appeals to, but even for a populist statement, this one makes no sense.

He wants to reduce the number of care visas, mainly because they’re ‘foreigners’ that we apparently ‘can’t look after’ despite the fact they’re coming to the UK to work, so will pay taxes and will probably be looking after all your elderly relatives so you don’t have to. I looked it up, to qualify for a Health and Care Worker visa, you must be a qualified doctor, nurse, health professional or adult social care professional. Hardly ‘low skilled’.

We also need them, there are approximately 165,000 vacancies in the social care sector. And this guy wants to cut visas. This is why the caring agency I hire to provide two and half hours of paid help a week struggles to fit that into their weekly rota and charge me a fortune for it.

Among the many flaws in this idiotic idea, is the fact that by 2040, about 1 in 6 of the UK population will already have to balance their job at some point in their lives to provide care to their loved one. They will probably have to give up their job or reduce their hours, losing their pension contributions during that time. If they have to give up their job they will have to claim benefits, and in the unlikely event they the whopping £76 a week of Carer’s Allowance, will be labelled ‘scroungers’ and ‘unwilling to work’ for doing so by the very politicians calling for these cuts. Cutting care visas and encouraging people to have more children will only increase the chances of that happening.

These types of stories are indicative of the total contempt the government has for unpaid carers and the real work they do. We prop up the system and now the government expects even more people to provide the care we’re unqualified to give and that we pay for in our taxes. The only solution is to fix the social care system and the NHS- but that is really hard, unpopular, and will require actual experts to tackle – not power hungry ministers that haven’t got a clue.

These policies will only help to create a nation of poor unpaid carers, which nobody wants. This is not about which political party to support, I don’t care who fixes it. But it needs to be addressed seriously and with a willingness to understand the issues, not make populist claims that appeal to their base. I don’t even care if they use AI to find a way to fix social care – it might also be able to help the government figure out how to get trains from London to Manchester while they’re at it.

Rant over- thanks for reading if you made it this far. I’d love to hear your thoughts.

References :

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2023/oct/02/families-should-have-more-children-to-care-for-ageing-uk-population-minister-says

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-66998692

https://news.sky.com/story/carers-struggle-to-find-support-for-loved-ones-amid-enormous-staff-shortage-in-adult-care-sector-12835867

https://www.aon.com/unitedkingdom/media-room/articles/caregiving-responsibility-set-to-increase.jsp
Gratitude and the NHS – the great silencing power

May 25th, 2023

I was struck by a conversation I had with my French mother recently. She’d fallen at work and hurt her arm and shoulder. Her colleagues had called the paramedics, they had looked her over and put her arm in a splint as she wasn’t badly injured. To be sure she was OK, she’d booked an appointment with her GP that afternoon who had signed her off work for 2 days and prescribed 5 sessions with a physiotherapist to help her recover full mobility. All of this was on the ‘Sécu’ – the French National Health Service. She told me this casually, as if the excellent care she had received was nothing exceptional and expected.

Because it was. Her experience was perfectly normal, they pay for healthcare in their taxes and they expected good care in return.

As she was talking I realised that, had this conversation happened in the UK, she would not have received anywhere near the same level of care (if any at all) and her tone would have been one of gratitude. In the UK, we also pay for healthcare in our taxes, yet we don’t receive it. And the strangest part for me is that we’re all so grateful for the lack of care we experience.

This is a uniquely British trait, we are all so proud and ever-grateful for the NHS. I agree. Our National Health Service is a wonderful institution and we should be happy and feel lucky that we live in a country where healthcare is free at the point of use and universal.

There is, however, another dimension to this gratitude. It keeps us quiet. It is such a powerful sentiment that seemingly going against it or complaining in any way about the NHS is seen as dangerous and any criticism can get you ‘cancelled’ in a heartbeat.

The result is that we are grateful for at-best-mediocre service.

How often have I heard horror stories of misdiagnosis, inexistent care, and never-ending waiting lists – all with often terrible health consequences. However, these stories usually end with ‘but they do the best they can’ or ‘we’re so lucky to have the NHS’. That’s not to mention that it is almost impossible to see a doctor for less serious illnesses, and the best we can hope for in the UK is a 10 minute phone call with an overworked doctor who doesn’t know who you are, has no context as to why you’re calling and takes an educated guess as to what the problem might be as they haven’t physically examined you.

We accept and even apologise for bad care because we’re grateful and we confuse healthcare staff with the system.

Let me make one thing clear, I’m criticising the system NOT the people in it. The doctors, nurses and other healthcare staff are trapped in this inadequate system and they do what they can within it. We should recognise and be grateful for them.

Politicians have understood the silencing powers of gratitude and use it as a shield to not fix the system. We all clapped for the NHS during the COVID-19 pandemic, but didn’t make plans to improve the system, pay doctors more, or hire more nurses.

No. We were encouraged to show gratitude as a nation, and the politicians moved on.

I think anyone working in the NHS would agree that they could probably do with less clapping but have more money and better working conditions to provide better care.

If we don’t start complaining and expecting better from this system, it will continue to deteriorate. Healthcare is not an electable issue so politicians make no real effort to fix it and only reference it with platitudes in speeches when they’re campaigning.

This goes for all aspects of the NHS, there is no basic care, no preventative care, no after care, baffling systems, overrun A&Es, and chronically overworked staff. And that doesn’t even touch on old age care- the main reason I have had to become a carer. I have sacrificed most aspects of my life to look after my grandmother because the system I pay for in my taxes is at worst non-existent and at best inconsistent.

Taking a leaf out of France’s book on this issue would be a good idea, a little higher expectations and a little less gratitude – s’il vous plait – by holding to account those who run the system. The French ‘Sécu’ is by no means a perfect system, but if even one of the NHS horror stories I’ve heard happened in France there would be riots in the streets and reams of paperwork filed to officially complain- a bonus of the French’s obsession with red tape.

Tag: politics

Kicking the caring can

Scareffolding

Go north and multiply?

Gratitude and the NHS – the great silencing power