Politicians talk constantly about the crisis in social care, and the pressure it puts on the NHS, so that the words just turn into a hum. Then you brush against that in real life and think why is anyone, with any kind of authority over anything, doing any activity that isn’t sorting out social care?
My mum has been in hospital, on a ward with five other patients, most of whom are vocally very displeased with being there. My mum just wants to feel less crappy, and fair play, who wouldn’t? The woman diagonally opposite just wants to see a doctor, but is a bit fogged on when she last saw one, which is hard. The woman directly opposite has a massive family, and gets constant Fomo, even when they’re all – even the teenagers – right round her bed, and she’s the event she would otherwise be missing out on. The woman in the corner was incredibly buoyed by the appearance of an emotional support dog, but then it had to move on to its other rounds, and after that she started full-time missing her own dog.
I’ve ruminated since on the core principle of emotional support animals; obviously, any hospital with a dog in it is better than one without a dog. But until dogs are interchangeable, which they never will be, there is always the risk of triggering the emotion, “this dog is nice, but I miss my own dog”.
The woman in the other corner is asleep most of the time, and when she’s awake, pretty happy, which I think you’d call living the dream.
And then in the final corner is the woman who is fine to go home, except that she lives alone and doesn’t have the right support, and she is lovely. She’s nice to all the nurses, and all the visitors. Whenever anyone loses some hearing aids, which is all the time, she has a bright idea about where they might be. My sister bought her some diabetic chocolates, and you’d have thought they were the moon on a sugar-free stick.
She’d also dearly like to go home, but she’s resigned to a world in which that’s not her decision, which is the reality of what not sorting out social care looks like: it’s not about hospital beds costing yay much and domiciliary care costing a fraction of that. It’s about medics forced to make decisions that aren’t medical in essence, and patients having their decisions taken away when they don’t lack capacity.
You need a really good reason, when you’re a system, to tinker with someone’s autonomy – especially when they’re so nice, but realistically, even when they aren’t. “Didn’t get round to addressing that problem we’ve known about for decades” is not a good reason.
