Watering the elderly

I was intrigued by this story on the BBC today.

Apparently elderly people are particularly vulnerable to dehydration. It can cause dizziness - leading to potentially serious falls - constipation and confusion.

The manager of one care home in Suffolk decided to do something about this.

Staff at The Martins care home in Bury St Edmunds started a “water club” for their residents last summer.

Residents were encouraged to drink eight to 10 glasses of water a day, water coolers were installed, and they were each given a jug for their room.

This has dramatically improved the health of the home’s elderly residents.

Jean says she feels 20 years younger.

“I feel more alert - more cheerful too. I’m not a miserable person, but it’s added a sort of zest.”

There are fewer falls in the care home, fewer GP call-outs, fewer laxatives are used, fewer urinary infections occur, the residents sleep better, and those with dementia are less agitated.

Wendy Tomlinson, the home’s manager, says:

It’s been fantastic. The whole home buzzes now; there isn’t that period after lunch when everyone goes off to sleep.

Elder abuse a serious concern

As I get older, I get more and more concerned about elder abuse. This is, I suppose, selfish of me. But when I think back to my mother’s final years of life - she was in a particularly good care home near Oxford - I can see how easy it is for frail elderly people to be badly treated by impatient or poorly trained care staff or to become the victims of abuse by neglect.

When we are younger, our bodies adjust more easily to insufficient water intake, so care home staff and management may not realize (as a result of their own experience) that older people need to drink more.

So care homes may, without knowing it, be causing their residents to suffer unnecessarily.

Worse than that, I can imagine, for example, that there may be badly run homes where residents with dementia who wear incontinence pads are deprived of water so that staff do not have to change the pads or urine-soaked underwear so frequently. Such treatment may well constitute a human rights abuse

Tougher regulations for care homes?

Cross-bench peer Baroness Greengross has been convinced for some time that many old people are not drinking enough water. She would like to see tougher regulations for care homes so that staff are required to ensure that residents drink enough.

I hope that by the time I need to be consigned to a care home such kinds of elder abuse are as unacceptable as the abuse of children.

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