Nursing care

Recently doctors explained that sadly they think my mother will die soon.

She is 92, suffering from advanced dementia, and has had pneumonia. During a busy pastoral day I found time to get to the hospital, as we have been doing every day. I walked into the ward but my mother was not to be seen. I asked a nurse where she was. ‘Didn’t you know?’ she said, ‘She was moved to a nursing home this morning’. I was stunned. She was very apologetic.

What was going on?

It wasn’t quite as bad as it might first appear. We were indeed working on getting mum to a nursing home. But there were legal forms to sign and it was taking us some days to track down our situation on enduring power of attorney. The letter from NHS Continuing Care clearly stated that nothing could be done until these legal documents had been correctly filled in and signed. But evidently that requirement had simply gone out of the window under the pressures to get my ‘bed-blocker’ mother out of the ward. She had been carted off like a sack of potatoes. We had no opportunity to try to explain to her what was happening or to bring clothes or items of comfort from her flat.