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28 February 2014

We write them off as vulnerable, non-sexual burdens – but the elderly are not just a problem to be solved

A new regular column, "Nurse in the City", by Brian Kellett.

By Brian Kellett

Have you heard of the “pink pound”? Of course you have – you read the New Statesman. I’m guessing that you also know about the “grey pound”, the demographic that takes in the elderly of this country.

You will know about the “ticking time bomb” of the ageing population and about how pensions are becoming so expensive that many of us will have to work until we are 68 or older. The elderly are also seen as “bed-blockers” who take up hospital places (though half of their hospital beds have been cut).

As a community nurse in east London, I spend most of my working day seeing people in their homes. You learn quite quickly in this job that the elderly are just as diverse as the rest of us and that it is misleading to refer to them as a homogenous lump. I used to work in various branches of emergency medicine. Back then, I saw patients for a very short time. After many years, I decided that struggling with drunks and dealing with young people who thought that a blocked nose was an emergency worthy of an ambulance were starting to wear a bit thin. Now, I have the time to get to know my patients and they get to know me. In many cases, we are on first-name terms. And each patient is different.

There is a woman I visit who is intensely proud of how clean she keeps her house, despite living on her own and being nearly blind. She has a little rota in her head – on Wednesday morning, she mops the floor (whether it needs it or not); in the afternoon, she vacuums the carpets; on Thursday, she dusts her house from top to bottom, and so on.

Then there is the woman who lives in a very mucky house – the sort of place that has you wiping your feet on the way out – and until recently would refuse all help from us. Finally, she agreed to let some people in to give it a tidy. It’s still dirty but there’s been a big improvement. I like both of these patients equally. They show their independence in different ways; they are quite happy in their way of life.

There are also the sisters who live together and are as thick as thieves (I swear they are conspiring to do something, like in Arsenic and Old Lace) and the woman who was thrown out for marrying a man from India – her family could not stand the “shame”. They drove her not only from her family home but from the village she grew up in.

The elderly, apparently, are nonsexual. Perhaps someone should tell that to the chap who says he enjoys looking at pornography, though “nothing down there” has been working for years, or the other man who has a wife and children but still flirts with me (it probably doesn’t help that I keep insisting on looking at his naked buttocks as part of his care package).

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I see atheists, Christians, Muslims, Buddhists, Sikhs and Jews. I see those with pin-sharp minds and those in the midst of dementia. I don’t need anniversaries to remind me of wars because I hear true stories about them on an almost daily basis. As I sit on the floor in front of my patients, bandaging their legs, I hear about how they became friends with German POWs, or how they drank themselves through Italy following their commander, or how they looked after their mates, or how they got to carry the “bastard big gun” because they were the tallest in their squad. For many of them, it was the formative experience of their life, not something simply to be trotted out every 25, 50 or 100 years and “celebrated”.

As I change their catheters, I listen to them talk about their time as union leaders; about strikes and how they did their best for their members. Some of them espouse political views that I disagree with. Sometimes, I nod my head and let it slide; at other times, I’ll have a good-hearted argument.

There seems to be a consensus that the elderly are vulnerable people who get abused in nursing homes, get pensions that are unsustainable, will freeze to death in a cold snap and take up valuable hospital beds, all at the expense of the “hard-working taxpayer”. But what we need to accept is that they are people and not just a problem to be solved.

Next week: Dr Phil Whitaker’s Health Matters

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