My mum couldn’t walk at all. She could only use her right arm. She couldn’t even get up out of her chair without at least one member of staff. If you look at the Ignored and Isolated page, you’ll read about the problems there were in getting staff to help and how she gradually ended up spending more and more time in her room.

That might not have been too bad. She’d always been happy with her own company, read a lot and liked TV. But none of that was possible when staff left things out of reach. Take a look at the picture of the room, just as I found it one day when I visited.

Note that we had to provide the low unit, so that all she needed during the day could be stored on it. Her book, her hair brush and mirror, snacks, liquids, the TV remote control–and so on, and so on. It could so easily have worked–and supported some degree of independence and quality of life.

So now spot the deliberate mistakes:

Here’s what you might have noticed:

• TV remote out of reach next to TV
• No sign of a call bell (it was out of reach on the bed!)
• Drink out of reach–and notice the size of the container (even on a good day she struggled to life a full pot of tea)
• And notice the taped cross on the floor–we put that there to remind staff where to put her chair so she could get at things
• And out of sight the TV may well have been turned off at the mains–a pretty common and completely basic problem (though it did save PrimeLife’s electricity bill, I suppose)

Time and again we left polite notes, mentioned it to staff and discussed it with the manager. She summed up her own impatience (not to mention impotence) with these words:

It’s not really about training. it’s just about commonsense–and about willingness to see the world from someone else’s point of view.

And it was clearly too much to expect from most of the staff–and the company responsible for managing and training them (that would be PrimeLife, just in case any additional emphasis were needed!!)