Foreign Perspectives

Mum had a fall a few months back and managed to break her hip which was replaced surprisingly quickly but unfortunately even after a couple of months worth of rehabilitation, her mobility is still way down from what it was and stairs aren’t a runner for her. That’s something of a problem as she’d have to be able to deal with the stairs to come home and so we’ve been looking for some kind of nursing home.

At the discharge meeting the consensus was that it would need to be a nursing home rather than a residential one so off we went round looking at places on that basis. All of that time was wasted as a) she’d not been formally assessed (and didn’t need “nursing” as it turned out) and b) every place we went to had a waiting list (20 years, yes TWENTY YEARS, in one case!!).

As far as rehabilitation goes, you get up to six weeks before they start looking for money and then you’ve 48 hours to move before you start writing cheques. That being the case, you’d think that they’d do the assessment a week or two in advance of discharge but in our case it was done the day before she notionally had to leave. Anyway, that kicked off another round of running around looking at residential homes. Except that they too had waiting lists and it was only a few days later that we were given a short list of ones that didn’t have lists. A list with three places on it, two of which were miles away and the third of which had a waiting list. So we asked again and were given another name which had a place. Except that it didn’t as it was away by the time we got there, just a couple of hours after getting the name of it.

We asked the doctor and he had a name of a place that seemed perfect. Snag was that it turned out not to be a runner financially. What they didn’t tell us was that they’d pay £426 and we’d have to pay anything above that. You might think that the person going in could pay it but they can’t as it has to be a “3rd party” (ie usually the sons/daughters). It’s also worth bearing in mind that this “top-up” can go up quite dramatically over the years eg one place we know of went from £10 a week to getting on for £100 a week over the course of 10 years (bear in mind that people usually stay 10-15 years).

Anyway, we’re back to the place that said they had a waiting list but had two empty rooms. Quite why those rooms were available us and not offered to those on the waiting list first is a mystery, but then so much of nursing home lore is a mystery. The remaining issue with it is that it’s basically an unfurnished flat so we need to source some furniture.

It appears that the OU are allowing a number (all?) of courses to be booked somewhat earlier than normal. Apparently gone too is the nonsense that was pre-registration which didn’t actually reserve a place as you might think. Combine that with the appearance of the phrase “subject to availability” beside all of the reservation buttons and it seems prudent to be booking courses somewhat earlier than usual.

The first impact of that for me was booking a place on the final run of SD329 (Signals and perception) which starts next February. A brilliant course by all accounts and one which is equally relevant to the three degree strands which I’m notionally running with at the moment (life sciences, chemistry and psychology). Ordinarily I’d not have been able to book that until around September (ie six months in advance).

More importantly, the second impact of that much earlier booking time is that the residentials for 2012 open for booking in late June rather than mid-October. Ordinarily that would be an easy choice as I need SXR376 (infectious diseases) for life sciences and it’s a really interesting one too. However, having signed up for S205 I could do SXR344 (drug design) which is the chemisty counterpart to SXR376 and looks really interesting too and one that I’d have gotten around to the following year were it not for 2012 being the final year for all the level 3 science summer schools.

To top it all, apparently there’s a major price increase on its way for courses starting in 2013. That’s encouraging people to rejig their plans to include any 60 pointers much earlier. Fortunately that doesn’t appear to affect me as by then I should only have two 30 pointers remaining.

Mum had a fall a few months ago and managed to land that little bit too heavily and consequently broke her hip. That in turn led to a new hip so the fall actually helped her in that she now has the new hip that she needed but would otherwise have needed to wait a couple of years to get. That then led to was an extended stay in what’s called an intermediate care home which is basically an annexe to the hospital in all but name and she’d been there almost six weeks now.

That “almost six weeks” means that last week I was called to what’s essentially a discharge meeting where all the social work people along with a representative from the care home to discuss what her situation was now and what should happen next. It’s almost six weeks because six weeks is the maximum amount of time that the local trust will pay for recuperative care and after that, well, that’s a good question as it turns out.

It was very clear from what was said about her current condition that our house just isn’t suitable for her and neither would we be able to offer the level of care that seems to be necessary, even were we to accept what would be a very high degree of care on offer from the trust. Actually, the level of care on offer was something that we’d had offered before and when we thought through the consequences, it just wasn’t going to be viable. Moreover, now they’re saying that it’s pretty much round the clock care that she needs which isn’t on offer and wouldn’t really be practical for us even if it were.

Anyway, that in turn meant that we we felt that a nursing home was the way to go. But is it a “nursing home” or a ” residential home” that she needs? That’s a good question and one that I couldn’t answer. Neither could the people at the meeting, at least not in a definitive way. Would it be permanent or temporary? Another good question although in that old people always get older I’d say that permanent would be a good guess.

A rather interesting question is who pays for it all. As far as the social worker group were concerned it was around £540 from them (in itself consisting of all but £22 of Mum’s pension and allowances) and the top-up of (for that home) of £70 from me. That was if the money was available in the budget which, of course, it may not be. A chat with Age Concern (OK, AgeUK, but really, who calls them that?) it was quite a different story. For one thing they appear to have to find the money from the budget and I don’t have to pay a top-up either as only someone “willing and able” to pay would have to pay (she can’t pay herself as it needs to be a 3rd party).

Until we found all that out we were running around everywhere trying to find a home that we could afford (of which there were none) and that had spaces (also none). Who knows what’ll happen on Monday when the six weeks are up though as I’ve not been able to get in touch with any of the social worker team.

Northern Ireland has had a variant of the Alternative Voting scheme for many years and in the vote today one of the biggest downsides of it is very plain to see.

In place of what was once a relatively short voting paper were two around two feet long with around 20 candidates on each. Even reading down the list takes a while and with two elections and the ballot for the AV system today, the queues are somewhat longer than usual. Is that a fairer system? Well, it would be, if people paid as much attention to their vote as politicians always seem to think that they do. In reality, people just don’t do that and thus the system probably ends up producing a result that’s less representative of “the people” than what went before. Picking one person that you’d quite like to represent you is much easier than choosing two or three amongst a much longer list of people.

Having said that, it’s more likely that people will add a name or two as a protest which they couldn’t do if there was only one person that they could vote for. Thus in response to the widespread dislike of the mass immigration that we’ve experienced one could expect that the BNP will pick up some protest votes.

Although it can take longer (a lot longer) to produce a final result from AV, that’s something that only happens every four or five years so is probably the weakest argument on the anti-AV campaign.

Is it worth having to give the potential for a protest vote? Maybe, but for me the biggest downside is that it makes it a good deal more difficult to use your vote effectively and that more than cancels out any advantage of protest vote potential.

I’ve been toying with the idea of doing the Open University’s main chemistry course for a while now but it’s one of those courses with widely varying opinions which put me off. Basically there were those who rated it pretty much as A-level and at the other end of the extreme those who rated it as pretty much impossible.

The reason for such wide variations is generally down to the differing backgrounds that people have. Come to a course with just the minimum entry requirements met and you’ll find it at the very difficult end of the range, come to it with quite a lot of preparation and it can be very easy indeed to do. The snag is that you generally won’t know what the “right” preparation is until you find yourself in the midst of the course. For instance, the “right” preparation for the Exploring English course isn’t a whole bunch of English courses and is instead a couple of their foreign language courses.

Anyway, S205 has been on my October short-list but generally getting pushed out by courses which were widely held to be doable.