[BITList] The State of the Nation - What the ????

[HUGH]

John,

I can vouch for some of the things that happened to the mother of the lady in the story, though not the dreadful "administrative error" (gross incompetence) that resulted in the letter she got.  Incompetence is a subject my wife hears about often nowadays from me, vis a vis much on the media.

Those of us with BOT/MOT certificates of various colours will have no trouble working out what incompetence is in the context of our respective trades, ie, behaviour of the type that gets the certificate withdrawn by those who issued it, said behaviour having made a nonsense of the wording on the certificate - and driving licences and (I assume) the various certificates issued to pilots are subject to the same rule, which is, display incompetence and you risk losing both qualification and livelihood.

Not so in other fields  - incompetent doctors and nurses may retain their qualifications, incompetent social workers, bankers, and Uncle Tom Cobley and all likewise.  And the prats who caused the present financial disaster are still there, beavering away at the behaviour that caused it all .... but to our tale ....

My father entered a hospital in Greenock after Parkinsons rendered him unfit to live at home alone and all our efforts to stave off the move came to naught.  Taking him into our home or living with him were both out - he would countenance neither, and dad with a walking stick wasn't a man to argue with.  He was OK with the move to the hospital, but his initial opinion of it was that it was "full of bloody old people".  That was true, since it was/is attached to a vast complex that deals with the elderly and less elderly infirm, the latter category including alcoholics and people with "mental" problems.  It's an open complex, though some of the units are not.  Not only was it full of bloody old people, to his horror groups came round at Christmas and bloody sang to them.  Since dad was relatively fit barring Parkinsons and his inability to cope with it (lashing out with his stick when frustrated), he didn't stay long in the hospital and was moved to a less restrictive environment where he had a room of his own and company.  That was when the fun started.  Within two shakes of a lamb's tail he became a different man, totally institutionalised to the point where taking him for a turn round the grounds upset him so much we stopped even suggesting it.  A run in the car went the same way, regardless of where to.  And he was invariably starving when we made our daily visit - my wife's mother and her step father went the same way in the same place.  I was approached by a doctor more or less demanding I persuade dad to hand over control of his meagre finances to the hospital admin.  I declined to do so and sent him away with a flea in his ear.  Dad lost weight and became vague, and one evening we were ushered into a side room and told he had died - of pneumonia, we later learned.  He died of neglect, and nobody will ever convince me much of wasn't deliberate or through sheer incompetence.  Stroppy old man (god almighty, I'm older than he was) equals inconvenience equals something in the drink to keep him quiet.  Doesn't like the food equals take it away and hell mend him - we've more to do than humour stroppy old men.  All of this we pieced together later.  When we were allowed in to see dad he was lying there staring at the ceiling - they hadn't even closed his mouth or eyes.  The young male nurse who took us in was distressed, but he did nothing to rectify matters.  I next saw dad in the undertakers with my sister, and his nose had been broken, no doubt while belatedly closing his mouth in the hospital - even in death they neglected him.  In the same circumstances my mother had looked like a young girl - we didn't recognise dad.  I ordered the undertaker to close the coffin and allow nobody else to see him, and that was done.

Hugh.

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