Who are the 'carers' in Nursing Homes?

Old people are not objects.  They were once young;  they had jobs and families, ambitions, trials and triumphs.  They are to be respected. Not neglected and certainly not abused.  

Even the children in this old photograph are now elderly. The adults are mostly gone.  They led full lives,  but some of them spent their last years in nursing homes. 

We cannot banish old age, but we must do all that we can to make their last years tolerable. One day, it will be our last years. 

 

Yesterday by Alison McRae

Recalling lost gone days of youth,

No sad tale is told.

There is no fear of life or death,

Young hearts are strong and bold.

Knowing with happy certainty,

They never could be old.

In my selective memory,

Each shining hour is blue and gold.

I can run and skip and dance

And the gentle wind is never cold.

--------

Training to be a Carer in a Nursing Home:

Lisa Backhouse writes:   

"There is no regulation for care workers in Australia , no national register to guard against this type of behaviour" (hitting residents) "No blue card or equivalent." "Nurses are registered under the Australian Health Practitioners Regulation Agency, but this does not extend to carers.'

  ('The Australian,' May 11-12, 2019)

Below is a post copied from a social media conversation.  It shows just why there are so many carers from other countries working with vulnerable old people. I would also point out that some of these people could easily harbour grudges against white people for perceived past crimes.

"A few years ago a young woman I know worked helping to care for the elderly and had to pay $10,000 to do a TAFE course to become a registered nurse.

At the same time Indian nationals answered advertising IN INDIA which enabled them to be flown to Australia for FREE, do the nursing course for FREE and be ASSURED accommodation and a job at the end of it!

The young woman - born, bred and schooled in Australia to Australian parents had NO such guarantee.

These IMPORTS told her they had NO interest in being nurses! They were doing it for a free ride to Australia! AND many of them couldn't even speak English properly!!!

To add insult to injury these imports got their certificate IMMEDIATELY while the young girl had to sign a stat dec to say she could read and write English!!! There was absolutely NO requirement for the Indians to have to do that!!!"

When I personally enquired into the training to be a Carer in Victoria, Australia, they said it was a 6 month TAFE course. It varies from state to state, no doubt, but is, in no way, demanding, and does not require any sort of personal qualities that might fit a candidate for the role.

 

Below is an ex-nurse talking about the training of carers and the care her mother received in a nursing home.

 'They do a course of around three months, with a bit of placement. Then they are unleashed upon the poor public. Nobody fails the course, and many are totally unsuited to the role. They only need common sense (rare) empathy and kindness (also rare) and a willingness to perform tasks thoroughly and thoughtfully (bloody rare.) They have no medical knowledge, mostly a low IQ, and it's just a job for people who couldn't get any other.

'Mum preferred me to take her to the toilet, because I was gentle and knew the mechanics of 'transfer' without hurting her. I also wiped or washed properly.  I was appalled one day when Mum asked me to cut off her 'dags.' She wouldn't hear of me complaining, for fear of retribution, which is totally understandable. 

'She was also left on the loo and cold for extended periods, mainly due to under-staffing. When being put back into her recliner or into bed, staff often forgot to make the call bell accessible.' 

There was more.  She concludes:  'Helpless people don't get 'care,' they get tight-lipped heaving about by resentful, overworked Personal Care Workers. Yes, a minority of them were good, but I witnessed so much that was quite substandard.'

Probably most of those in aged care are not deliberately assaulted, but that happens as well. There have been stories, sometimes horrific stories.  I remember the smell of old and helpless people lying in wet beds for hours on end quite well, but it appears there is a lot worse than neglect going on.  

  

This one, for instance. A care worker was helping look after a couple in their own home. He wheeled the disabled husband out of the bedroom, and then raped the woman, aged 83.  Old women are not like younger ones. A rape can cause a great deal of damage to fragile and inelastic tissue.  That is not to mention the devastating humiliation of the poor old girl.

The perpetrator accused the victim of framing him, but there was DNA evidence.  One wonders how sick a man must be to do that to an old, old lady.  He faces up to 25 years, the article says. I think that execution would be more appropriate. 

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-7594909/Aged-care-worker-Simon-Prodanovich-raped-grandmother-bed.html?fbclid=IwAR03qPMR_9XXDkF8Tm_x_94iw9kAu8CvW3l56NU1pLugWFs0DW_7wO6gDvU

And then there is the story of an old man with dementia being beaten with a slipper.  'A Sydney nursing home worker was caught on a hidden camera using a shoe to hit an 82-year-old man with dementia, a court has been told.  Footage from the camera, placed by a concerned relative in the elderly man’s room, also showed Prakash Paudyal roughly pulling the resident by his shirt.' 

https://www.news.com.au/national/nsw-act/crime/sydney-aged-care-worker-admits-assaulting-elderly-man/news-story/25a1d41df42413d8fc77d845db82ea8c

To make matters infinitely worse, in 2020, there has been the Pandemic - Covid 19.

In some areas, people infected with Covid were sent back from hospitals to Nursing homes which were quite unequipped to treat them and could not even manage to keep them from infecting others.  In New York, for instance, under Governor Cuomo, the death rate in Nursing Homes was horrendous.

In Victoria, Australia, Dan Andrews, premier of Victoria, ordered the same thing. As a consequence, Victoria's death rate was far higher than in any other state. 

Dan Andrews

This was bad, but there are other problems to do with Nursing Home lockdowns. Residents have so few protections aside from the regular visits and concern of family.   In most countries of the world, visitors are banned. Sometimes exceptions have been made if the old person was dying, sometimes they were not.

The ban on visitors was supposed to be so that Covid did not spread to the residents, but without concerned family, I wonder how many of the old ones died of neglect or even malnutrition because no-one was checking up on them.  Little has been reported about this, though I did see something about old people who tested positive for Covid being put on 'End of Life' drugs rather than treated.  In other words, euthanasia, but not voluntary euthanasia. 

I saw a video, too. A 'visit' was permitted - through a window. The daughter saw that her old mother was looking very ill, and pleaded that a qualified nurse check on her. The request was ignored, 'ring back Monday,'  she was told, and the sick old lady was wheeled away.  

We are now in March, 2021,  and most nursing homes are still in lockdown. My heart bleeds for the old people.   Some would be confused, not understanding why the nurses are masked, and why they no longer see family.  How many die, not of Covid or of natural causes, but of a broken heart?   

Right: This is a picture of Grey Nomads.

It is so sad to think that within just a few years, many of these grey-haired people will be the  residents of a nursing home and subject to the 'care' of some quite uncaring 'Carers.' 

Once proud and competent adults are treated sometimes with brisk indifference, sometimes with a surface kindness that masks indifference. They are lucky if they are not too much neglected. 

And this is the saddest fact of life there is.

-----------

This old lady was lucky enough to spend her last years reasonably active. She never lived in a nursing home.

Her grand-daughter, beside her, is getting old now.  I do hope she also escapes the helplessness of living in a nursing home. 

My conclusion -  

It is a very big problem in nursing homes that a large number of 'carers' are from overseas. They have minimal training at no expense to themselves, often no desire to be in aged care, but want the visa that goes with the pretence that they do. Further, they have no special affinity with those of different nationality, different race. Instead of thinking that this old lady is like my granny, they are merely 'other,' and because they are other, a few of them go from neglectful to abusive. This is a big part of the problem, the carers. 

The Royal Commission into Aged Care Quality and Safety report has just been released. It will have appalling stories, stories that make you cry.  It is unlikely to say that using foreign carers could be a problem as that would be  'racist.'  It is not racist.  It is a statement that we need people who care and can see the person in the body of a sad old man or woman.  We do not want our elders to be at the mercy of those who merely want the visa. 

We need our own people to look after our own elders. Training does not need to be extensive, but a bit of common sense is essential, (often sadly lacking) and real caring is also essential. The carers have to understand that the old person is not just an object to be heaved around and food thrust at them, but a human with a history, a person who has lived, maybe had a family and has had his achievements and his heartbreaks. They should be respected and they should be treated with as much dignity as possible. As my own old mother told me once, 'Old age is so humiliating.' It is a carer's job to make it not humiliating, just as much as they can.

Luckily, there are carers like this, usually middle-aged themselves, Australian, who very much care for the welfare of their charges.  It is sad that they are in the minority. 

https://www.health.gov.au/health-topics/aged-care/aged-care-reforms-and-reviews/royal-commission-into-aged-care-quality-and-safety

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Nursing Home:  Alison McRae

Imprisoned within helpless bodies, crying voicelessly to unheeding gods to set them free.

Tired nurses patiently coax unwanted nourishment between reluctant lips.

Loud cheerful voices strive valiantly to penetrate the pall of apathy.

Sad wives and dutiful children come and go, hopefully bearing gifts

that cannot heal the grieving spirit, mourning lost independence,

pride and dignity, believing itself unloved, unlovable.

Bewildered wanderers pace endlessly, seeking in vain their own lost selves,

forever haunted by vague memories of a distant yesterday,

of tasks unfinished, promises unfulfilled.

A desolate figure waits forlornly by locked doors, imploring embarrassed passers-by to take him home.

In my dreams their yearning eyes still follow me, pleading hands reach out to me,

And a lonesome voice keeps calling, calling

“Is anybody there?”

The Death Mother

This is the opening chapter of my new book - a story about the Gift of Death.  

Early morning, Tea Tree Lake, Mortlake, Victoria

Chapter 1

It was a dream that began it, not just the dream, but the feeling that went with it - the feeling of an enormous love and compassion. I held the poor, poor skinny old lady in my arms. I held her with love, and she felt no pain from all of the sore spots and all of the aches that go with an old, old body. She weighed nothing at all, and I held her so gently. She needed to die. She needed to leave the body that was only a burden for her. It had been so long since she'd been young and free. For years she had yearned for an end to the suffering. She wanted to endure no longer.

And I gave her that. That body in my arms, weightless, feeling no pain for the first time in years. And she died. I gave her that. She died, and I carefully put her back in her bed and covered her. She was finally gone, finally free, finally without pain. Love. Compassion. And I freed her.

I didn't lose that dream when I woke, though if there were details, they were lost. What led up to it, what happened afterwards - if those things had been part of that dream, they were not retained. Just the feeling of an overwhelming love and compassion. And then the poor old, old lady was finally free.

If there was a God, it was what He should be doing, not me, just a very ordinary, middle-aged lady. Grey-haired, a worn face, and my own beginning aches and pains, the sign of what was to come, the trials that old people endure every day. Most old people, in spite of those stories of old people lifting weights or running endurance events. Most of us are not like that. For most of use, old age is an endurance event.

I continued to think about it as I went about the morning routine, showering, dressing, making and eating breakfast, the same as on every other day. It was as I rinsed my coffee mug that the identity of that poor old woman came to me. It was old Mrs. Campion, Vera Campion. She'd been one of those I'd visited the day before, one of the sad residents of the Nursing Home that was only a short walk away. My husband had spent his last nine years there. He'd been only fifty when he'd had that stroke, two years older than myself. The children had come to see him, even Deb, who'd been in Italy. It had been the holiday she'd planned for years, but she hadn't hesitated to cut it short. But seeing their strong father so helpless, just lolling there in the reclining chair, often dribbling, unable to speak, not really knowing how much he could hear and understand - it was too much for them. They'd tried, but their visits quickly became fewer. And they lived so far away, Jenny busy with her little son, such a demanding tot...

But Kane was eighteen now, in his last year of school. Quicksilver, they called him. My only grandson - lithe, black-haired, filled with the arrogance of youth. I didn't see much of him. I bored him, and I knew it perfectly well. His father's parents were different. They had wealth, a big home in a big city, and money enough to spend on their family. They travelled a lot, and were happy to subsidise their son and his small family so that they could go with them. It was no wonder that Jenny and Renzo spent far more time with his parents than they did with me. Me, Shirley Bridgewater, who lived in a tiny country town, had no career and not even a husband. Not any more. Stan. He'd been gone seven years now, sixteen years since our lives together had come to an abrupt end. There had been no warning signs, he was not a smoker, not a heavy drinker...

But I switched off that line of thought. There were occasions when I'd have a quiet cry, privately, for myself. But I'd be a lot more lonely if I didn't socialise, and while I found playing Bingo an awful bore, I would not tell my friends that. Joy, Gwen, Maisie and Christine. None of them were close friends. I had no close friends. But life would be unbearable lived entirely alone, and I took care not to show that I sometimes found their chatter shallow and their pursuits less engrossing than they found them.

So I checked my watch and prepared to go out to play Bingo. We'd probably have lunch afterwards, maybe at the pub, maybe we'd try the new restaurant just opened, though their prices were a touch fierce for a country town. It would be interesting to see how long it lasted.

*

 

Tea Tree Lake, Mortlake, Victoria

 This story is not much like my previous books.  I know the general direction of the novel, but have not yet decided how it will end. And it really did begin with a dream - that dream, vividly remembered.  

The difference is that the fictional character finds that the ones she dreams of, really do die. 

It is far too soon to speak of a possible date of publication.

Look for my books on online booksellers such as Smashwords, The Book Depository and Amazon.   

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  http://www.bookdepository.com/Not-Man-M-McRae/9781477615966

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