Good week/bad week

By Rebecca Law, Media and PR officer

This was a good week for the millions of tons of food that are unnecessarily binned each year. Now, instead, it’s the sell-by dates that are hitting the scrap heap.

Just as producers will no longer be able to mislead customers into thinking their food is off, we got to thinking, isn’t it time we applied the same principle to older people too, who often, are considered to have a sell-by date of their own?

Time and again, we see evidence of ageism and discrimination across society. From the health service to the workplace, older people are treated as though they have a shelf life. In fact, far from being second-rate citizens, older people make a disproportionately large contribution to society – their volunteering alone was recently valued at £10billion a year and the free care they provided to their grandchildren helps contribute £4billion a year to the economy. They are a wealth of knowledge and experience and they can, do, and want to continue making a valuable contribution to society. So shouldn’t we include a shift in the way we label older people too?


This was a bad week for the Care Quality Commission (CQC) after a Select Committee report claimed the regulator in charge of inspecting hospitals and care homes had “distorted” its priorities. The CQC has been focussing on registering providers, which in turn, has led to a 70% drop in the number of inspections it conducts to check care standards and safety. The report states that some hospitals are not even visited every two years if they are deemed to be low risk.

Perhaps then, we might be unsurprised by this morning’s news, that half our hospitals and care homes are failing to look after patients. This is even further evidence of neglect of older people in hospital wards and care homes and comes just months after another CQC report, which found evidence of older people being overlooked, left thirsty, or not given the assistance they need to eat while in hospital. We have to ask ourselves whether children or younger adults would ever be treated in this way. Ultimately, though, this neglect damages not just the patients but the healthcare system itself: poorer care means older people take longer to recover and are more likely to be readmitted. And that, in the end, will cost us all.