I have found from my experience with my father and listening to others that these homes are crammed to capacity with beds.  Therefore there is hardly any walking space. Chests of Drawers are placed in walkways and passageways. If you ask the providers what recreational activity they offer for more active patients, they will tell you praying and singing.  Those activities are not recreational. Accountability.  Patients are beaten at times or tied to a chair all day and untied when their loved ones visit.  Sometime the patients who are incapacitated are not cleaned regularly.  The health officials who are  tasked with monitoring these homes must be made accountable too.  I have heard that sometimes they are offered money to look the other way. I was told this by two different care home workers.  I suggest that:

• cameras should be made mandatory in the homes with recorded footage.  
• Recreational activity for the elderly made mandatory. Board games, social gatherings, walks.
• professional behaviour in the face of erratic and abusive behaviour of the patient. I observed the other day while visiting someone at the hospital, a dementia patient called a nurse a 'black bitch'.  The gentleman's relative asked the same nurse to help him pull the patient further up on the bed.  The nurse told him 'no' seeing as she was a 'black bitch'.  I thought she was unprofessional.  The patient was black himself.  It sounds funny but my Dad had dementia and he accused me of stealing or plotting against him all the time but I never refused him care.
• Jail terms and de-registering for health officials who take bribes  and also for Care homeowners who offer them.
• Discipline for doctors who change medication for elderly patients with dementia, brain injury or other mental challenges, without informing all responsible persons. I have had this experience both with Carlisle Goddard and Ambrose Ramsay.  The medication caused negative behavioural changes in one case and seizures in the other and then I was called in after the fact and was still never informed about changes made.
• Bring National Insurance regulations inline with the laws of the land so that unscrupulous spouses who have left the marital home for many years and did not contribute to the care of their spouses do not benefit from the spousal benefit by producing a valid marriage certificate. Instead allow enough payments to clear outstanding medical expenses for the just deceased person.  Or have the caregiver bring in the outstanding invoices for reimbursement.  My father's estranged wife (14 years away from the marital home at time of death) receives $1000 per month for the last seven years and she works at Royal Bank of Canada in Mississauga, Canada and the NIS deposits funds to her Firstcaribbean account using a family address in ST.John.  I am told that she will get this for the rest of her life. I would think that this phenomena is bleeding the fund as the NIS officer I spoke to told me that this occurs by the hundreds.

by 

Narisha Ramdin