Should we ask empty nesters to move home? | Society. A new report suggest older people are 'hoarding' rooms they don't need. Photograph: Kirsty McLaren/Alamy At last we have someone new to blame for our social woes. It is not the greedy bankers or the politicians who are making our lives a misery – it is those awful wrinklies. While working families sleep six to a room, oldsters are living it up in their mansions. Or so The Intergenerational Foundation's look at the housing crisis implies.
Having spare bedrooms, previously a blameless result of children leaving home, is rebranded in the report as "hoarding" living space. And the foundation's co-founder Angus Hanton proclaims: "The divide between the housing 'haves' and 'have nots' has moved from being one dominated by wealth or class to one dominated by age. " Magnanimously, the IF does not "blame" older people for clinging to these homes when younger families need them, but just asks them to think about the "profound social consequences of their actions".
Baby boomers are hoarding big homes at the expense of the young | Phillip Inman. There are an estimated 25 million empty bedrooms in England. Photograph: Alamy A report that says there are 25m unoccupied bedrooms in England alone should make anybody who cares about the prospects for younger people sit up and think. A situation where there are more than 400,000 empty homes is bad enough, but 25 million empty bedrooms? That's in a different league. The report documents how a process of death and renewal is not happening after a dramatic rise in life expectancy and a refusal by many older people to downsize when their children have grown up and gone.
The Intergenerational Foundation – set up to campaign on financial issues, particularly those affecting younger people – is concerned that the tax and benefit systems do little to discourage people retaining homes larger than they need. Apart from the cost of heating and lighting a big home, there are few disincentives. It questions single person discounts on council tax.
Which leads us back to the question of who is rich. Demos | Projects. This project has now been launched with its own micro-site, which can be accessed here. This ground-breaking project will redefine poverty for the 21st century. Demos, in conjunction with leading social research organisation NatCen, will develop an entirely fresh way to think about poverty in the UK by establishing new ‘types’ of poverty defined by more than just income. These types will be characterised by a wide range of factors such as education, housing, access to services, physical mobility and capabilities. For decades, politicians and policymakers have tended to go straight to the most common definition of poverty: households that live below 60 per cent of median income. Our previous work on poverty measurement, such as 3D Poverty, revealed the significance of how poverty is defined for future policy. This project is not only about measurement, it will also develop practical techniques to combat it in real-life situations.
Advisory Board Paul Allin Director Lady Victoria Borwick. Eric Pickles unveils plan to cut costs and aid troubled families | Society. The communities secretary, Eric Pickles, has claimed he can cut funding for 120,000 so-called troubled families by more than £8m simply by ensuring each family has only one case worker to look after their problems rather than the current multiplicity of agencies. He claimed more than 20 local agencies can be involved with the same family, overlapping and sometimes pulling in different directions.
Ministers have appointed Louise Casey, the former 'respect tsar' for Tony Blair to oversee troubled families, and is expecting reports from local councils by Christmas. Pickles revealed a single problem, or troubled, family can cost the state up to £300,000 a year and predicted this figure can be cut by £70,000 annually simply by reducing the number of agencies involved. Some of these families can be involved with the local authority, schools bodies, drug and alcohol services, the police and an array of social service departments. One in seven nursing homes breaking the law on feeding patients. CQC 'failing to protect adults abused or neglected in hospital' - 10/16/2011.
The Care Quality Commission is failing to protect adults experiencing abuse or neglect in hospitals, Action on Elder Abuse has claimed in a damning report. The regulator stands accused of failing to follow up on individual incidents of maltreatment identified in inspections to ensure that patients are safeguarded. In response, the CQC said it welcomed the report but that it “offers views about CQC’s role that we don’t necessarily agree with”. The findings were based on an Action on Elder Abuse analysis of CQC’s inspection of 100 hospitals against dignity and nutrition standards, an overview report of which was published last week. CQC found one in five hospitals were not compliant with either the dignity or the nutrition standard.
Failings included curtains not being closed when people were receiving personal care, call buttons being left out of patients’ reach and staff speaking to patients in a condescending or dismissive way. However, Action on Elder Abuse found: What do you think? Neglect of the elderly in hospital. Here is a letter I wrote about a patient who was discharged from hospital last year.
I was quite upset, as you can tell. Names have been changed to protect confidentiality, but it’s otherwise exactly what I wrote: Dear Consultant/ ward sister/ Hospital Chief Exec.I visited Mr Bloggs at home today just a few hours after he was discharged from 2 weeks on Ward 3 under your care. When he arrived home he looked as if he had spent 2 weeks sleeping on the floor of a hostel for alcoholic sailors rather than on the acute ward of an NHS hospital. Mr Bloggs, has metastatic cancer and is quite easily disoriented. I’ll quote from the letter of response: Mr Bloggs medical and nursing notes are comprehensive and note that he was assisted with personal needs. … a heavy beard is not recalled … he was regularly monitored and well attended to … he did not voice any concerns … he engaged well with staff and there were no reports via staff of dissatisfaction. 1. 2. 3. 4. 6. See also Like this: Like Loading... Rosenhan experiment.
Experiment to determine the validity of psychiatric diagnosis As a critique of psychiatric diagnosis, it broached the topic of wrongful involuntary commitment.[3] The experiment is said to have "accelerated the movement to reform mental institutions and to deinstitutionalize as many mental patients as possible".[4] Rosenhan claimed that he, along with eight other people (five men and three women), entered 12 hospitals in five states on both coasts of the US.
Three of the participants were admitted for only a brief period of time, and in order to obtain sufficient documented experiences, they re-applied to additional institutions. Respondents defended psychiatry against the experiment's conclusions, saying that as psychiatric diagnosis relies largely on the patient's report of their experiences, faking their presence no more demonstrates problems with psychiatric diagnosis than lying about other medical symptoms.[5] Pseudopatient experiment [edit] While listening to a lecture by Ronald D. Retreat into the Medical Model. Like just about everywhere else in the public sector, Child and Adolscent Mental Health Services (CAMHS) are feeling the effects of the cuts. As in so many other areas right now, jobs are having a nasty habit of not getting re-advertised when people leave. We haven’t yet had actual redundancies in our neck of the woods, but the whispers are in the wind.
Particularly vulnerable to the cuts are the psychotherapists – psychodynamic therapists, family therapists, art therapists, play therapists. There aren’t many of them employed in CAMHS, but their influence extends beyond their numbers. I’ve had some fascinating conversations with our psychodynamic therapist who keeps “accidentally” leaving papers on attachment theory on my desk. The opportunity to co-work with systemic and family therapists has genuinely transformed the way I conduct my clinical practice.
We get a complex mix of cases coming through our doors. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not anti-medical model. Like this: Like Loading...