The ILC/Age UK paper “the end of formal adult social care?” is a must read for anyone interested in social care and older people. It highlights the ever increasing gap between the numbers of people who need social care & the numbers of people who... Continue reading
Getting older is a fact of life and it may be a time in your life when you can embrace new activities and new ways of living. I read recently that we live until we die which I thought was a nice sentiment. However, for... Continue reading
n Last week, Healthwatch England published their report “Safely home: What happens when people leave hospital and care settings?”; it made for sobering if unsurprising reading. They highlighted 5 main reasons for the problems people encountered focused around delays in getting services, lack of coordination,... Continue reading
In 1954 Rev Mary Webster gave up work to care for her elderly parents. In the years that followed she had a growing realisation that her problems of providing care, unpaid of course, to her parents while dealing with her own loss of income and... Continue reading
n This week is dying matters awareness week the fantastic campaign to get everyone talking about the one inevitability of life; death. Death cafes where people can talk about dying over coffee and cake have sprung up everywhere and end of life care has become... Continue reading
Our Voices is based on people’s stories – everyone has a story to tell. The story of AWOC is that it was founded when 2 things collided; the first was my own realisation that I definitely would not be able to have children and the... Continue reading
Andrea Leadsom’s comments on motherhood, bad enough in print but considerably worse on audio where the full “but I have children” emphasis shines through, have highlighted exactly why AWOC is needed. Her comments do not come as a surprise, In our recent research “Our Voices”,... Continue reading
It’s hard to know how to respond to the latest in what seems to be never ending line of stories about appalling treatment of older people trapped in the abyss between health and social care. Today’s report by the Health Services Ombudsman highlighted in The... Continue reading
“Are we really saying these people had no living relatives or friends? Or is it something sadder, namely that the busy, atomised lives we increasingly lead mean that too often we have become so distant from blood relatives that we don’t have any idea even... Continue reading
One of the many consequences of there being more people ageing without children is that more and more people are not, and never will be grandparents. 1 in 5 people over 50 have no children and therefore of course no grandchildren. In addition there are... Continue reading