A Process of 'Natural Selection' ?

13 Carers…one resident…£450,000 bill – Echo 9th July 2012.
Peter Collins’ article is, as usual, heavily biased towards the Vale Council’s deliberate misrepresentation of the events that lead to this seemingly wasteful position. The council brought this situation about because they wanted to profit by selling the Bryneithin site for housing. To bring this situation about, they stopped any maintenance of the building in order to say it was dilapidated, too expensive to refurbish and ‘unsuitable for purpose’. This was a typically underhanded way of achieving their goal of closing this care home, prior to selling the site. Their skulduggery continued when they limited the number of patients that could be in Bryneithin, thereby creating a situation that spread the total overhead cost over fewer residents, which made it seem that the home wasn’t ‘viable’. [ Here, I have to say that attaching any viability test to the only specialist care home for the elderly mentally infirm is as stupid as saying that a road or a pavement wasn’t viable ]. Also, social or health care service provision should be assessed in accordance with current and future need. Needless to say, that neither the Vale Council nor the Health Board have conducted a Needs Assessment for their area for over a decade.

Therefore it is an easy untruth to say that this specialist home should be closed because of lack of use – by limiting the number of residents, then stopping any new admissions completely – because they have provided no evidence whatsoever as to the need for Care Homes specialising in dementia patients having dropped. In fact, the need for specialist homes for the care of dementia patients is growing as the ‘BabyBoomers’ are increasing the number of the elderly, exponentially.
Therefore, the Vale Council have deliberately wasted all of this money in order to appear pious and long suffering over a situation they created with cunning premeditation. Also this disparity is exacerbated by elected hypocrites of all parties, whose primary concern is the preservation of their fat-cat lifestyles. The truth of the matter is that there are a growing number of Elderly Mentally Infirm for whom adequate care will no longer exist. Incurable dementia patients are being herded together with non-suffers and classed as being ‘geriatric’, whose needs are considerably less costly to provide.

Margo Farbrace and her friends and colleagues have fought hard for years to retain this much-needed specialist care facility, whilst the authorities have shunned their Duty of Care by callously dismissing all reasonable, intelligent argument, and the legal rights of these terminally ill patients. So, the carpetbaggers and other hypocritical Public Servants are hell-bent on reducing the population of the Elderly Mentally Infirm by depriving them of care in order to shorten their lifespan. If readers have elderly relatives, fight now for the care they will need. R. W.