Had a visit from the Community Mental Health Team leader last week who came round to tell me that Jean’s Friday Day Centre attendance is under review.
The Centre she uses is dedicated to Advanced Alzheimers patients and is open from 9 am to 3 pm on Fridays. There are about 9 patients that attend with 2 qualified and 1 apprentice carers who look after them.
The powers that be have been reviewing the patients and have decided that, because they are advanced patients and, in some cases, not very mobile and, in all cases, unable to use any sort of cognitive reasoning, the patients are not getting any benefit from attending the centre.
Their idea is to close the centre to advanced patients by not replacing those that pass on to Nursing Homes or reach the inevitable end of the disease and only use it for early onset cases who have just been diagnosed with the disease.
I immediately got on my high horse and asked the following questions:-
1) If the the patients have lost their ability to communicate, what evidence can the reviewers show that the patients are not getting benefit from attending the Centre?
2) Are the main carers to be consulted about the benefits they get from a brief respite once a week?
3) At what point will the centre not be available in numerical terms. At the moment there are 9 patients and 3 carers. Will it close if there are only 8?, 7?, 6?. Can it be expected to remain open if there is only 1 patient and 3 carers?
4) What arrangements are to be made for transferring the patients to a Daycentre at another location. Will they be split up and have to get used to losing familiar faces amongst the other patients and the familiar faces of the carers?
The Team Leader acknowledged that they were good points that I had raised but added that the review results were not as yet an absolute proposal and the details had not been worked out at this time. In other words “we have not got a clue what is going on” (my interpretation).
She did say that it was not a cost cutting exercise as the centre would remain open for early diagnosed patients and “no I can’t tell you why they are not proposing to accommodate those patients elsewhere rather than move the advanced patients to strange surroundings”.
Why cannot this Government, Council or whoever these nameless reviewers are just leave poor, confused, disorientated patients and their struggling, tired carers alone?