MPs Urged to Close Legal Loopholes to Protect Elderly- (UK)

Close loophole which leaves elderly at risk, MPs are told
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by Chris McLaughlin

MPs are being urged to close a legal loophole which has left elderly and disabled private care home residents unprotected against human rights abuses. The law currently leaves those most vulnerable to abuse open to maltreatment from malnutrition, neglect and lack of privacy or worse.
Examples of abuse of the elderly recorded in care homes by the British Institute of Human Rights include:

• Residents with mobility difficulties being left in their own waste for hours;
  
• Emergency night calls being ignored because residents are “just looking for attention”;


• Continent older people forced to wear incontinence pads because staff “do not have time” to help them to the toilet;


• Bathing residents in the same bath water;


• Over-medication to induce docility;


• A lesbian resident banned from placing a photograph of her partner on her bedside table because staff claimed to be offended.

In spite of successive Government promises, statutory protection against such abuse is not covered by the nine-year-old Human Rights Act. A series of judicial rulings means that those receiving care in private or charity care homes have no recourse to the legislation and are therefore not guarded by any protective deterrent against abuse.

All state services, including the NHS and publicly-run residential care homes, are already within the scope of the Act.

A campaign led by Age Concern and backed by Liberty, Help the Aged and Justice among others is calling for the Government to accept an amendment to the Health and Social Care Bill, currently in committee stage in the House of Commons, which would close the loophole.

Ministers have offered to close the loophole with stronger regulation but campaigners argue that the estimated two to three years delay is unacceptably long for older people to be denied basic human rights protection.

Without the proposed change, residents or their relatives are able to complain to the care home but cannot take a complaint any further.

Kelvin Hopkins, Labour MP for Luton North, who has tabled an amendment to close the loophole said: “Thousands of older and disabled people do not have access to the protection they were promised.

“This amendment would ensure that those who receive contracted services are guaranteed the same levels of protection and rights to redress as those in the state sector.”

Gordon Lishman, director general of Age Concern, said: “We want this scandalous exclusion of independent care home residents from human rights protection to end. “The Government should also ensure that older people are protected through effective regulation and inspection, background checks on staff and an independent element in the complaints procedure.”

SOURCE: The Tribune (UK)