Monday 17th October 2011
For immediate release:
The recently reported neglect of the elderly on National Health Service hospital wards may be a symptom of the “culture of death” that has grown out the loss of respect for human life following decades of abortion and destructive experimentation on human embryos, the Rt Rev. Mark Davies, the Roman Catholic Bishop of Shrewsbury, has said.
In an address to the annual meeting of the Society of St Vincent de Paul in Ellesmere Port, Cheshire, Bishop Davies said that the “alarming” findings of last week’s national report by the Care Quality Commission on dignity and nutrition for older people contradicted the “vision which first inspired the work of the hospital and the vocation of the medical and caring professions”.
Bishop Davies asked if medical ethics had been perhaps corrupted by practises which demean the value of human life.
Bishop Davies said: “Management and nursing practice have been questioned but surely we have need today to ask more searching questions of ourselves in a country where millions of lives have been destroyed in abortion, where human life is routinely experimented upon and discarded and when today pressure grows for what is called ‘mercy killing’ to end the lives of the terminally ill and the aged. So as a society we have need to ask: are we losing that respect and reverence for what Blessed John Paul II called, ‘the sacred value of human life … the incomparable value of every human person’. (Evangelium Vitae no.2) on which the very ideal of the hospital and the caring professions are founded?”
He added: “Could it be that we have begun to dismiss the cries of the weakest in the place where they expected to receive the greatest care because their impaired lives no longer seem to have any great value?”
The Bishop of Shrewsbury praised the “tireless work and witness” of the Society of St Vincent de Paul and the Church’s voluntary organisations in their “service of the poorest” and said that it was the precious value of every human life that inspired both the work of St Vincent and Blessed Teresa of Calcutta. At the event on Saturday 15th October, Bishop Davies also reminded his audience that “this witness to the value of every human life, especially the most impaired, is more vital than ever before”.
Notes to Editors:
The Care Quality Commission (CQC) is the independent regulator of all health and adult social care in England. It seeks to ensure that a good standard of care is provided for all recipients of care services whether they are patients in hospitals, residents of care homes or people who are being looked after in their own homes.
The CQC’s national report, published on Thursday 11th October 2011, follows its review of “dignity and nutrition for older people” in hospitals that conducted following a request by the Government in December.
The review involved a targeted inspection programme between March and June, examining the question of whether elderly patients were treated with respect and if they were given food and drink that met their needs. It involved the largely random “spot check” inspections of 100 NHS hospitals.
According to the national report, the review found that nearly a fifth of the hospitals were failing to meet the basic legal standards and a further 35 needed to make improvements in their standard of care. Just 45 hospitals inspected were found to be “fully compliant” with their obligations toward elderly patients.
Among the problems identified was the failure to help patients to eat, and the interrupting of patients while they were eating so that their meals went unfinished.
The privacy of elderly patients was not always respected, according to the report, because of the failure, for example, to close curtains and screens properly.
Call bells were in some cases put out of patients’ reaches, or not answered soon enough, and this left some elderly patients rattling their bed rails or banging their water jugs to attract the attention of nurses. Hospital staff also spoke to some patients in a “dismissive or disrespectful way”, the CQC found.
The report said that basic care of elderly patients was “no mystery”, however, yet concluded that many hospitals were “struggling or failing” to provide such a service.
It blamed the crisis on “excessive bureaucracy” and “short staffing” in some hospitals but also found that such problems existed even on wards that were well-staffed because of the poor attitudes of some doctors and nurses.
Dame Jo Williams, the chairman of the CQC, said that “the fact that over half of hospitals were falling short to some degree in the basic care they provided to elderly people is truly alarming and deeply disappointing”.
The Society of St Vincent de Paul is a voluntary lay organisation dedicated to alleviating poverty and disadvantage through practical assistance to people in need. It was formed in Paris in 1833 by Frederic Ozanam and it has been active in England and Wales since 1844. Inspired by the teachings and example of St Vincent de Paul, the main work of the society is in befriending and assisting individuals and families in need, with SVP members visiting people in their homes – as well as in care homes, hospitals, prisons and other institutions. There are about 10,000 volunteer members in England and Wales, divided into 1,100 parish-based groups. Together they make more than half a million visits each year to vulnerable people in their communities.