Care Home closures – a necessary evil?
Yet another care home closure hits the headlines. This time it is Underhill House in Wolverhamton. The council says that updating the home would cost £2m and it is better to move existing residents out. A matter of considerable distress for a small number of older people is a public relations nightmare for the council.
Put simply, the interests of the council are in conflict with the needs of a 106 year old woman. With the argument in these terms, anyone with a beating heart would have sympathy for the elderly woman who has least power and most to lose. It is arguable that the stress of a move to a new care home would be dangerous and maybe even fatal for such an elderly person, so almost everyone should wish her well in her fight. Speaking personally, I hope she is able to live out her days wherever she can be most comfortable. As a society we owe it to our elders to do our best for them and I am gratified to live in a society where the media shouts and screams about such things.
There is however another side to this story. The council must comply with laws, such as the disability discrimination act and CQC inspections of Underhill House mention problems with the building. In order to comply, care homes must meet certain standards. For old buildings this can be a substantial cost and sometimes it is much cheaper to build new rather than convert and have sky high maintenance costs for decades and still have a poor quality environment. It seems inevitable that the task of improving the quality of care homes will sometimes mean a house must close, and this is impossible without moving residents.
It is easy to rebut this with the ‘human cost’ argument for keeping this home open – and maybe this should trump the bean counters in this case – but the general public might be less certain if the actual choice faced by the council was more ‘visible’.
Assuming this is a sub-standard building, it either needs to be repaired or replaced. Repairing the home, may mean higher local council taxs for the dubious ‘benefit’ of keeping several elderly people in a building site for the last couple of years of their lives.
It is not clear what the ‘right’ thing to do is, perhaps the media is doing the right thing by highlighting the plight of this woman and the council is doing the ‘right thing’ in trying to provide the best care homes for the people of Wolverhampton without increasing council tax or cutting other services. Maybe the law courts are the right place to solve such difficult problems.
No one has exclusive claim to the moral high ground here, but for the residents it may be a matter of life and death – and for the council it is one of those no-win decisions they deal with every day but dread making in the full glare of the media and legal spotlight.
