Liz Saville Roberts

That is exactly the point. The real good that family carers could do for health and care settings that are well run should not be regarded as a nuisance to be fitted in but something that can complement excellent services. Care and nursing homes operate under a number of constraints, financial and regulatory pressures especially. Many are excellent. They are shining beacons of humanity and kindness and provide a welcoming home. Remember, this is a place where people live and a home for the people who live within their walls, but that is not the case for all those who live in care settings. MPs will almost certainly have been approached by family members who are extremely reluctant to raise questions about the care of a loved one in a home, because they are afraid that their loved one will be evicted from that home. That is what the care home owners and managers can do, so it is our role to raise those concerns and be their voices. I pay tribute to the many pressure groups and charities that have drawn attention to this issue. Among them are John’s Campaign, Rights for Residents, and Care Rights UK, which was formerly the Relatives & Residents Association. I am personally immensely grateful to Julia Jones of John’s Campaign and dementia nurse Delyth Thomas for their advice after my mother Nancy’s stroke at Christmas 2020 and her final death from dementia a year later. I would like to read a tiny bit that I wrote at the time: “Many of the key workers with whom we interacted over the last 12 months were extraordinary. We have been beyond lucky to have dealt with a number of nurses, doctors and care workers who had the confidence and humanity to keep to the spirit and not the letter of official edicts. Even so, I touched my mother’s hand only once during the critical six weeks after her first stroke. There were no hugs. Health authority infection policy vetoed family bonds of love as a health hazard to be minimised.” She used hearing aids, and we could only speak to her through the window, but the batteries were not replaced. She could hear nothing, and we know how important hearing is for reducing the effects of dementia. Ysbyty Gwynedd and Ysbyty Bryn Beryl—that is the district hospital and the local community hospital—were signed up to John’s Campaign, which enabled me to be recognised as my mother’s carer. If only I had known that months earlier. I of course bear in mind that this was during the covid period, but people need to know their rights. At one stage in early 2022 the staff at the community hospital asked me to come in specifically to help to take pressure off nurses because there was a covid outbreak. I contributed as a carer—I had a role to play. As a family carer I helped that hospital. I was required to take covid measures—tests and vaccination—exactly as was expected of staff members. That is completely feasible for identified family carers alongside salaried carers—it is an option for us. Family members, as recognised and respected carers, can be a real source of help to hospitals and care settings, if we can only tease apart the web of fear of liability, and a culture that presumes that the human needs of adults with cognitive impairments are limited to food, shelter and a screen in the corner of the room whenever an emergency threatens the organisation that holds their life in its hands. We are social creatures. If we are denied social contact, we are damaged. We need to recognise that as a human right. Regulations expected to be facilitated in undefined emergency circumstances are evidently failing. I am so glad that health and social care was in the Labour party’s manifesto for the last general election. It was in Plaid Cymru’s manifesto too. Health and social care are devolved, but it is a human right, and that is not devolved; that is a reserved power. I hope that now we have learned the lessons of covid we can move ahead and legislate to make health and social care a human right.