Emma Soames We raised the issue of age discrimination in the NHS in Saga Magazine many months ago and thus I am delighted that, since then, the Government is now in consultation mode around this very issue. But we should not hold our breath – buried in the small print of the Government document is the revelation that the implementation of change has been put back to the next Parliament in 2012.
Age discrimination causes real heartache and worry to older people and their relatives: attitudes among medical staff from consultants downwards in our hospitals have become so blatantly discriminatory that thousands of people are literally terrified of going into hospital – not out of understandable nervousness about outcomes but about the likelihood of negligence and only a remote chance of getting a fair crack of the medical whip. Older people seem to go to the back of every queue, be it for treatment for strokes or proper and compassionate nursing.
In far too many cases the old and frail are blatantly short-changed and in far too many cases negligently treated on wards by nursing staff who should know better. Indeed, recently the Royal College of Nursing had to issue an edict to its members to look after old patients properly and not to treat them as bed-blocking inconveniences. It had come to that.
There is so much that needs to be improved in this area and new rules can only improve things, However, we live in a world of living wills and one-way tickets to Switzerland. I do not believe that we want the pendulum to swing so far in the opposite direction that very old frail people are kept alive against their own wishes. It is a narrow tightrope that new legislation needs to tread and if ever common sense were required, it is around this issue.