Care in the community - Really?
Tony paice
How many times have you heard the complaint that families should take greater responsibility for their disabled or mentally challenged relations? Or the view that too much is being spent on bussing or taxi-ing “these people” around. If I’m honest, I don’t think I gave care in the community too much thought, being too immersed in episcopal research or involved with worthy associations in London and Winchester.
That changed shortly before Christmas when my future wife and I attended a Christmas fête at Fernleigh Day Care Centre in Walton. There is almost no information about the Centre on Google and it is certainly not treated by the MP – our illustrious Foreign Secretary – or the Council, as a local flagship enterprise. It exists, however, and in many ways, is the most Christ-like service to the needy I have come across in years. Every weekday, it receives up to eighty people in the morning, feeds them, occupies them, cares for their every physical need and sees them off back to their various so-called sheltered homes. Yes, buses and taxis are involved. There is no whiff of urine or faeces when one walks into the centre; it is kept pristine. This contrasts with a number of the care homes I have visited round Surrey in the last ten years or more, where the odour is unmistakeable.
What impressed – or rather depressed – me was that Anne and I were practically the only outsiders to attend the fete. There were virtually no other supporters. The “inmates” were happy enough, some quite exuberant in their sales’ pitches. We walked away with a small moulded Christmas tree and a jolly ceramic Santa, plus sweeties won as part of a raffle prize. And we had drunk tea and eaten cake. We had also had conversations which we barely understood with our fellow humans present, whose powers of expression and clarity of speech were hard to follow. But we knew we were being made welcome.
One of the reasons my future step-son gets on so well with his many charges is that he has learnt to decipher garbled speech. That requires a great deal of patience and understanding of his “customers”. It is a form of humane conduct that few of us have the time or inclination to develop. For what he and his colleagues do each day, however, is quite exhausting and deserves rather more recognition than the pittance they receive by way of salary. It should go without saying that the Centre is under-staffed. A few MBEs wouldn’t come amiss though.
Yes, of course we know that society has got much of its values upside down. Why do we pay so much to ‘sports-people’ and celebs? They wouldn’t be paid such outrageous sums without there being a market for their sometimes dubious talent. Ah but, I hear a strangled cry, “at least we don’t exterminate “such people” as they did in Nazi Germany. Indeed so; when talking of the Holocaust, there is a tendency to overlook all the gypsies and “inadequates” who were rubbed out of the script by Hitler and his cronies.
No, but we do vote in politicians who promise the earth and when they come into power can’t deliver. Within a few days of the recent election, Fernleigh learnt that it would be coming under further financial pressure. More strangled cries: we all have to pull in our belts, “take control” of our own lives and contract out. Find more imaginative ways of dealing with “these people”.
Mm! Do such as what? Get the families of “these people” to pull their weight? Provide the transport and assist with supervision at the Centre? Actually attend the annual Christmas fete? Help with fund-raising like Woking does for its hospices? There is a snag, dear fellow parishioner. None of those up to eighty people (human beings) at Fernleigh has a family. If their parents and kinsfolk are not already dead, they were abandoned as being too difficult years ago. Aye, there’s the rub!
This article was written before the virus got going, so there is an update. Fernleigh was closed when lockdown was introduced. But the group homes where the “customers” are housed have to keep going. They have been visited by the plague. Their charges, however, can’t just be forgotten, so a skeleton staff, including my future step-son, is still on duty there. PPE was a problem and, so far, the much-trumpeted tests have not been extended to them. And, come the “all clear”, he and his fellow workers will probably not receive a penny more. Our much beloved sports-people and celebs will, though. We really do need to get rid of the frippery in our society; oh, and tighten the belts of the obese.
-Tony Paice