Claire Young

Everyone deserves high-quality care when they need it—that is particularly the case for those with dementia, who often have some of the most complex needs—but the sad reality is that social care services in this country are in crisis. The disease has a huge impact not only on the patients, but on their family and friends as they struggle to care for them. Richard wrote to me about his experience of being a full-time carer for his wife of 55 years. She has ataxia, compounded by dementia. She is losing her ability to walk or talk, write or use the phone, or follow simple instructions, and Richard has to be with her 24/7 to ensure her safety. The daily routine starts with getting his wife out of bed; transporting her to the bathroom; helping her with the toilet; getting her into the shower and then getting in the shower to shower her; helping her clean her teeth; getting her back to the bedroom to dry her hair and dress her; taking her downstairs via their self-funded stairlift; getting her into a wheelchair to transport her to the dining table for breakfast; and then taking her back to the lounge. She may sleep for a little bit, but sooner or later there will be a call for help to go to the toilet, so it is back into the wheelchair, back on the stairlift and back on the toilet. Richard will clean and dress her, and then she will go back on the stairlift, back into the wheelchair and back into the lounge, where the whole palaver will repeat after five minutes, as she has forgotten that she has already been to the toilet and cannot be convinced otherwise. That is just one small part of a day, and it sounds relentless. Owing to a recent back injury, Richard has had to employ a carer for two mornings a week to help. He wants to care for his wife as long as he can, but one day he may have to move her to a nursing home, and that worries him. He reckons it will cost approximately £1,800 per week and rising due to the increase in national insurance, and he is now worried that in pandering to populism on immigration, the Government may make it even harder to recruit carers. He says: “Once again, it is the least fortunate and needy of us who will bear the cost.” Another constituent wrote: “When my wife was first diagnosed with Alzheimer’s in 2019, we were given a couple of booklets and told to prepare for the inevitable.” He went on to explain that for a couple of years, including during the covid lockdown, they saw no one apart from the occasional surgery visit, until a crisis in 2023 led to the community mental health team being involved. For a while, his wife got a fair amount of support, but when the mental health team deemed her stabilised, that support was withdrawn, leading to another crisis in January 2024. He is very worried that the whole cycle will play out again and again.