UKH

You couldn't make this up:-

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8914373/Police-ARREST-qualified-nu...

What on earth has happened to us?  I thought care homes were places where you were cared for?  A place where a resident's rights & dignity were paramount?  Instead they have become a slave to the 'save lives' mantra, and obviously at any human cost.

What next?  Putting fences up around universitites to prevent students from escaping? ....................  oh!!!!

When I first read this I was outraged. What an horrific situation for all those involved.

However, it appears that the care home has a duty of care toward the mother and the daughter does not have a medical power of attorney for the mother and therefore, legally, has no right to remove her mother from the home.

Maybe it’s a salutary lesson for those of us with elderly relatives to ensure that we have the correct power of attorneys in place before it’s too late.

Strip out the covid aspect.

Woman enters into care home without permission, removes vulnerable adult who may not have capacity to consent to it and leaves with her. What's going to happen?

As baron mentions, if you don't have power of attorney for health and welfare then you can't make decisions on their behalf.

Being that it is a Daily Hate article I strongly suspect it is not the full story and has been deliberately reported rather one-sidedly to provoke a reaction. Remember the care home has a duty of care to its residents that presumably includes not allowing them to be kidnapped by random family members no matter how medically qualified. I suspect that the care home probably called the police after getting nowhere with trying to sensible discuss where the best place to provide care for the 97-year-old resident was. There will also be a process which will take into account the wishes of the resident, relatives and their medical needs. I think this story could easy be reframed as "Nurse under enormous pressure due to pandemic has nervous breakdown around care for mother" 

If you read the article to the end it reveals police were called because the woman forced her way into the care home, with allegations of assault, hence why police were involved. 

Exactly. I do try to read as little of the Daily fail as possible, just in case you can catch bigotry from it.  

Here's the beeb's report,.  :https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-humber-54801702

They have not been allowed to touch or meet face to face with their mother & gradmonther for 9 months.  That is not the way to look after relatives!   I'm sure visiting your relative in a prison is more humane.

Neither have I. But that's because I don't want to risk taking a disease to them that would likely kill them.

I almost find there's a moral 'knot', to do with at what point does contact or communication with loved ones help to slow a mental decline of somebody (or when does the opposite begin to happen), and how can that be balanced with protecting them from something which might kill them, is it worth the risk, and who's assessment or decision is that to make?

I do agree on the whole, and it's why I've held off going to see my Dad and his immune suppressed partner, I'm going to have a test before I go down for Xmas, and he's potentially going to pick me up by car, but it has been lurking in the back of my mind to do with very old people who don't have all their faculties still, sometimes contact with loved ones keeps them mentally more together.

I half wonder if it's 'a better kind of suffering' to be more together mentally, once one has started to lose it...

But in a care home it's not just about your relative. They are a community through which the disease is proven to move very fast and be very destructive. 

I agree that lack of contact speeds up their decline. It sadly means that whatever we do screws them over. 

Stopping the disease getting into the home though does have to be a priority because you can't choose to expose the other residents to the risk because you seem it to be more beneficial to your relative. 

Yes of course, that'd just occurred to me after I'd posted, about the risk to other residents. 

I suppose it's more obvious if it's a hospital. My friend's daughter has just spent a month in hospital after an unpleasant operation, she had just turned 18, so they weren't allowed to visit. 

It still seems a little perverse to me.  Sort of, 'we'll try to keep you safe and lock you up no matter how much you don't like it'.

Even worse when you consider Covid cases were being dumped into care homes when all this mess started.

I believe the lady had a DOL order on her, hence the police being called. There use is abused. My mother in law had one even though she, at that point, could only move by being pushed in a wheelchair!

As far as we know grandma is perfectly happy in the home. All the distress reported is from the daughter who is at “breaking point” - are we really sure she is the best person to be looking after granny at the moment, when it sounds like she is wanting to do so due to her own stress levels and not because it is necessarily in the best interests of granny?

In many cases it will be far more humane to have someone with dementia cared for in a home with trained staff on rotas, than at home being cared for by a very stressed family member. 

Dunno about your MiL but DoLs assessments are fairly common, very specific, and generally for pretty mundane things. E.g. someone with mobility issues might have bed rails to prevent falls at night, or a seatbelt on their wheelchair that they can’t necessarily undo easily, both of which would need DoLs paperwork. In the case of someone reliant on being pushed in a wheelchair, often DoLs assessments would need to be done to justify why they haven’t been provided with a means of controlling their chair themselves.   

From what you’ve said it doesn’t sound like you quite understand DoLs.

DoLs almost certainly has nothing whatsoever to do with the police being called in this instance. 

It's the Daily Mail, so it probably has been.

I'm confused, why is learning from that terrible mistake worse?

jk