In Chinon, 2012. He was 83.
Dad when he came to stay with us in France in October 2014.
He was helping us by shelling walnuts from our walnut tree.
On his 90th birthday. November 2018.
My father passed away peacefully in his sleep during the night of 2nd July 2022. He had been in hospital for three weeks after falling in his apartment, then he was transferred to a care home where he lived for just one more week. He was 93, and in fact was just four months short of his 94th birthday.
He had been an officer in the Royal Navy, was a gifted design engineer, an accomplished pianist, a writer and, of course, a caring husband, father and grandfather.
R.I.P., my dear old dad.
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It is now August 2026 and I have decided to tell the awful story of how the NHS, Social Services and other organisations that we trust to support the most vulnerable people in their old age have let us down. It makes uncomfortable reading and telling.
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My dad was I believe the very first person to have heart bypass surgery in the UK at the age of 51. The technique was completely different then from how it is now and suffice it to say it was not a huge success. He subsequently had a stent fitted and two more bypass operations - yes, three in total. After the third one the surgeon told him he would live another ten years which gave him a life expectancy to the age of 75. That's what he and my mum planned for.
She died suddenly, without warning, four days before Christmas in 2002 at the age of 74. My dad was devastated. This was not in their plan. Suddenly he was the widower and everything was topsy turvy. He never really got over it.
In 2003 he sold what was the family home (a small semi detached former council house) and put every penny he had into buying himself a small bungalow near to his youngest sister. He didn't settle and in 2005 he moved to a bungalow nearer to us. A mixed blessing but probably for the best, I thought.
For the next few years he settled into a routine and was, as far as we could tell, enjoying life. He visited his sister once a week for lunch, came to us every Sunday evening for his dinner, wrote and self-published three novels, played his piano, spent Saturday afternoon with his youngest brother listening to classical music, researched the family history on his side and wrote his memoirs, almost finished building his steam engine and joined the local steam railway society.
In 2007 Nick and I bought a little house in France for our holidays. (We were going to buy a caravan but discovered we could get a small house for about the same amount of money.)
We were on holiday in France for two weeks the summer of 2010 and on the Friday evening I phoned Dad to see how he was. He said he was getting a new burglar alarm. I asked him why and he said because the one he had wasn't good enough. The new one was going to cost £6,000. My dad probably didn’t have more than a few hundred pounds in the bank.
The scam had gone like this: earlier that week he took a cold call from a burglar alarm company who targeted old and vulnerable people. They got his attention by pointing out all the nasty things that burglars do to old people when they break in and offered to come round and give Dad a quote for a "proper one". They came that Friday morning, frightened him to death and he signed up for it.
On that Friday evening we could do nothing about it being in France so I phoned my brother who lived sixty miles away. He said he would go round on Saturday morning to look at the paperwork and talk to Dad about it. There is a fourteen day cooling off period in situations like this so he should be able to cancel it. By the time he got there the alarm company had been and fitted it so the cooling off period was null and void. My dad never used the alarm as it was too complicated. He tried to set it but ended up with it going off when he got out of bed to go to the bathroom so stopped using it. It took him five years to pay off the debt as it had been supplied on the company's loan service.
My cousin at that time was the chief trading standards officer for the county. He said that calling back early to fit the goods, whatever they were, windows, doors, burglar alarms, as long as the customer agreed to it, was a common way for scammers to get round the law, to get the job done before the old person could discuss it with family and cancel it. They were within the law although morally corrupt. They had phoned Dad early that Saturday morning and offered a small discount if they fitted it that day.
We tried and tried to get Dad not to answer the phone or the door unless the caller was someone he knew. He ignored us because he thought he could outwit them all. One Saturday morning my brother had called to see him and saw a white van drive slowly past the house, reverse and stop outside the house. A burly looking man got out and rang the doorbell. He wanted to cut down the conifers at the back of the house. When my brother said he was not interested the man became insistent that they needed doing, verging on aggressive. My brother said one last time he was not interested and shut the door. The man went away, shouting that he had been told to come by Dad. Dad denied it. Some time later the conifers were cut down. The man made an awful mess but Dad thought that £600 to have them removed was a bargain.
Dad came to stay with us in our little French house in France. He enjoyed his week with us but spent a lot of time on the phone. My brother had given him one of his old computers to help him with writing his memoirs and novels, but dad had discovered internet dating (for old people). He had three women lined up and was arranging to meet all of them. We were pleased as he was definitely lonely and a lady companion would be good for him. In reality what he wanted was a wife.
He met online a woman called Susan who lived about twenty miles away and started seeing her regularly. After a few months alarm bells started to ring when he said that she and her daughter wanted Dad to sell his house and put the money into jointly buying one to live with them. He carried on seeing her for a while then suddenly stopped. We were hugely relieved. Dad could do whatever he liked with his money but this lot definitely seemed like gold diggers to me, exploiting his loneliness to enhance their situation. He had taken her (and sometimes her daughter and son-in-law) out to lunch twice a week for a whole year and they never paid once. That's how desperate he was for female company.
On another of our summer visits to France we had a phone call from Dad to say he had shingles. He was mortally embarrassed because the lesions were all around his bottom. He was very shy and coy about any part of his anatomy between the waist and the knees. I persuaded him to phone the doctor who said that as he had had it for a few days there was nothing they could do. After a while he couldn't pass urine. The doctor came out and sent for an ambulance. The virus had affected his sacral nerve and he lost use of his bladder. He would have to be catheterised permanently for the rest of his life. He was horrified and thought his life was now over.
After a number of very fraught and awkward weeks he was seen by the district nurse who trained him how to self catheterise. It was a huge improvement and allowed him to live a normal life but the thought occurred to me that as he got older, what would happen if he couldn't do that any more. For now, at least, he was in control of his bodily functions and we could all live with that.
In 2014 we moved house in France and few weeks later Dad came to visit us. At the age of 86 he had met online another lady called Sybil who lived sixty miles away. He spent a lot of time talking to her on his mobile phone while he was with us and seemed quite besotted. At mealtimes we had to coax him out of his room where he talked for hours so that he couldn't be overheard. He arranged to meet her and they formed a relationship. She didn't drive so Dad drove up and down the M1 every two weeks, spending two weeks with her, returning home for a few days for medical appointments, specifically his INR tests, before going back again. He had been taking warfarin ever since his first heart bypass operation, so for over thirty years.
We were now spending summers in France and winters in the UK, juggling visits so we could keep an eye on Dad. In early January 2017 we had a late night phone call from Dad's sister saying he had phoned her in some kind of distress and seemed confused. We got out of bed, got dressed and went round to his place. He seemed to be almost back to normal to us and he couldn't understand what the fuss was all about. We called 111, he ended up seeing a duty doctor in the early hours of the morning and was admitted to hospital. He had had a subdural haematoma, a bleed on the brain. He more or less recovered but was never quite his old self. The hospital doctors were horrified that he had been taking warfarin for so long and immediately took him off it.
After that his zest for life vanished. He stopped playing the piano, could no longer fathom how to use his CD player to play his classical music CD's and gave up working on his engine. He just vegetated in front of the TV all day. We got regular phone calls which would begin with "telly's gone for a burton" because he had pressed the wrong buttons and confused it. He was still however driving up and down the M1 to stay with Sybil every few weeks.
In 2018 we offered to take Dad and Sybil to France for a holiday, to stay with us there one last time. It was not a huge success as he was tired a lot of the time but Sybil had a whale of a time.
In 2019 he announced that he could no longer manage the drive to and from Sybil's house and that they would have to stop seeing each other. In late 2019 a routine eye test revealed that his macular degeneration had worsened and he no longer met the legal requirement for driving. He was distraught but the next day we took him to the mobility shop and got him a mobility scooter. With that he could get to the corner shop where he could stock up on essentials and, it turns out, a lot of whisky. He still phoned Sybil every evening.
In February 2020 he announced that he would like to move to "sheltered housing". We were immensely relieved. He was an easy target for scammers and had been robbed of thousands of pounds over the previous years, one way or another. Getting Dad into sheltered housing (an assisted living apartment) was the best way to get him out of reach of all the scammers, the nuisance phone calls and doorstep pushers of things he didn't need, the worst being the burglar alarm scam. Over the previous few years he had spent thousands of pounds on home maintenance scams, gardening scams and insurance scams. He insured his gas cooker so expensively that he could have bought himself a new one every four years. He insured his dishwasher annually - but had never owned a dishwasher in his life.
We visited a few housing facilities and he settled on one near to us, a wise move. We all know what then happened in 2020. Because almost everything shut down his application for a flat just sat and sat for months on someone's desk. The facility has ninety two apartments and many of them were vacant but the management of the facility said they were unable to perform the usual checks and interviews "due to Covid". I phoned and emailed daily and was told they were waiting for authorisation from "higher up" to sanction resuming of the processes required. I wrote to our MP, the then Conservative Lee Rowley, to ask if he had any idea when anyone "higher up" might sanction this. He said he would look into it and within a fortnight the interviews had been performed by Social Services, outside on my dad's back yard, next to the dustbins, fully masked and socially distanced. He moved into his flat in October 2020, shortly before his ninety second birthday. The months of isolation during lockdown had done him no favours and his decline, physically and mentally, was noticeable.
The facility was part privately owned, part local authority. There was a care team on site. Flats were allocated to one third independent residents, one third medium care residents and one third fully dependant. My dad was in the first category as he didn't need any help; we sorted out his shopping etc, and he could more or less look after himself. We were reassured that when he moved to the next category of need there were carers on site to do this. We hired a cleaner to visit him once a week and do his washing.
By the time he had been in his apartment for a year we realised things were not going well and that he needed more help. The downstairs team said they were too stretched already and we would have to source help elsewhere. So much for that benefit of moving there.
I spotted a likely looking carer person in the car park and asked her a few questions. We signed the company up. He was to have visits twice a day to give him his medication and breakfast in the morning, to shower him three times a week and to make him a sandwich in the evening. We thought that would be straight forward for any carers.
We noticed that Dad was losing weight and becoming more forgetful. With his agreement we began the process of dementia assessment. The first interview was by telephone due to Covid and Nick was there with him. He said it was shocking, Dad was clearly confused but very non-cooperative, almost belligerent.
Other things started to worry us so we installed CCTV in his apartment, with his approval. The camera was positioned above his kitchen sink so that we had a view of his living room and kitchen. The idea was to check up on him and see what he was up to, not to check on the carers, but what we saw was truly alarming. Bearing in mind that either we or my brother (who had moved into our house) visited him at some point most days, we had no idea what was really happening. Dad would lie through his teeth and deny everything for an easy life.
He began having toilet accidents. I spoke on the phone to a continence nurse who said he was not properly incontinent, he had something called functional incontinence where his legs couldn't get him to the bathroom soon enough and she would go and see him. Her aim would be to supply him with pads. I remember where I was when I took this call, on the pavement outside a cafe in a French village. I explained that he was successfully using single use catheters and that whatever she did she must not just turn up at his flat unannounced. He had dementia and was horribly embarrassed about anything to do with his "plumbing" and would be highly unlikely to answer her questions or cooperate. I said if she could ring me with an appointment to see him my brother could be there at the same time to make sure that what he said was true and not what he thought would get her out of his flat.
About a week later Nick and I were out walking the dog in France when the continence nurse phoned again. She had been to see Dad unannounced because she had had a cancellation and could fit him in. She was very worried because when she asked him about his catheters he said he hadn't used one for weeks and denied having any "bottom" accidents. Dad would have said this to try to get rid of her, to pretend that he didn't need catheters any more and that he certainly didn't need pads.
I was furious, this was exactly what I predicted. Even worse, because he said he hadn't used a catheter lately she had arranged for a home visit for him to have an ultrasound on his bladder. Poor old Dad, his pretence had backfired and he would soon have yet another person, almost certainly a woman, groping about in his nether regions. I told her that if she had looked in the bathroom bin she would have found it stuffed full of used catheters. A supply of pads arrived but were never used. The care company said they would show him how to use them and make sure he did but the packs remained on top of the bathroom cabinet, unopened.
On the CCTV we saw that the carers gave him his breakfast and tablets every morning but he often didn't take them. In the evening he binned the sandwiches they made for him after they had gone. He would ask them to put them in the fridge then he threw them in the bin. He regularly made excuses not to be showered. He would say "I've already had one" and they said they believed him. I personally believe they didn't try too hard to persuade him as it was one thing less to do before they had to move on to the next client. When I mentioned this to the care company I was told “we can’t force him”. That's how they missed the pressure sore forming at the bottom of his spine due to spending all day sitting in a chair in front of the TV.
The facility had a good restaurant on site and for the first year Dad enjoyed going down to have his lunch every day. Then he just stopped. The restaurant manager phoned me to say he had stopped coming so not to pay the bill any more. Dad had never mentioned this to us. I arranged for the lunch to be delivered to his flat each day but on the camera we saw him bring it from the door, in its polystyrene container, put it into his walker and leave the flat. Two minutes later he would return. He was taking his food to the dustbin room and throwing it away uneaten.
I contacted Social Services and after many delays a social worker finally came out to assess him. Both me and my brother were there and we told her everything that was going wrong but she was adamant that Dad was not yet in need of a place in a care home, that with adequate care visits he could stay in his own home, that he did not meet the basic criteria. These were: was he leaving the building and wandering around alone and had he burned or scalded himself? I truthfully said he’d done neither of those but afterwards thought that honesty is not always the best policy. I made numerous phone calls to local care homes but they were all full and in any case would not accept new residents without the recommendation of a social worker. We were dismayed.
Soon after that my dad continued to have more frequent toilet accidents which produced a mess that he tried to deal with himself. Eventually there were blobs of poo all over the flat, on the carpets, on the chairs and especially in the bedroom and bathroom. He refused to use the pads. I persuaded him to put all his soiled clothes on the bathroom floor and Claire the cleaner would deal with it. She was amazing. She would change the bed, change the towels, clean up and, above all, take all the soiled items home and wash them. She was not fazed by anything. That young woman had turned out to be his true carer and the only star in my dad's universe. She deserved a medal but instead we increased her pay.
One Saturday evening in 2021 we were in France and checked in on the camera. My dad was frantically stabbing at his phone, trying to phone someone. He seemed very distressed. My worst fears about the catheters had materialised and something awful had happened, we didn't know what. By then my brother, whose own home was sixty miles away, was living in our house in the UK to be on hand for Dad whenever we were in France. Since the start of Covid he was" working from home" so could work anywhere. We phoned him and he went straight round to Dad's flat, to find he had had some kind of mishap with a catheter and could no longer pass urine at all. My brother took him straight to A&E where he was quickly sorted out but came away with a permanent fixed catheter. This was a whole new ball game. He had to have a daytime bag and an overnight bag which the carers would empty and change for him.
The care company were, frankly, awful. A few of them were well meaning, nice people but too many of them were lazy and lied about it. I was already worried about them measuring out his daily meds and giving them to him but the catheter was a whole new ball game. The worst of all was a male carer called Edward. He was so obese he could hardly walk and on the CCTV we could hear him wheezing as he shuffled around the room. There was surely never a person less likely to be able to look after an old person. All carers wrote a daily in a log book saying what they had done each visit. We observed that it frequently didn't match our observations but Edward was nothing short of criminally negligent.
Dad had been getting visits twice a day and we increased it to a night time visit so they could make sure he got into bed and change his catheter. There was the evening that the young carer who arrived at the flats without the key code to get into the building. A passing visitor let her in but when she got to Dad's flat she hadn't got the key code for the front door either. She tried ringing the doorbell but Dad didn't respond so she went away to her next client. Dad didn't get any supper or change of catheter that day.
The care company sent me a rota of who was visiting Dad every day for the week ahead. There were many weeks that he had twelve different people call on him in a week to provide his care. There were never less than six. The times of the visits varied enormously. Breakfast could be anywhere from 7.30am to 11am, teatime from 4pm to 7pm and bedtime from 6pm to 10pm. Frequently by the time the teatime visit was made Dad had already gone to bed so they didn't get him up to feed him. They said they could empty and change his catheter while he was asleep but I wasn't sure if I believed them.
This is not the best way to treat a frail and vulnerable old man. All these strangers, mostly women, coming into his flat to feed him and talk about his toilet problems upset and confused him and the lack of regular routine was not at all what we expected. I complained to the care company but was told that they had such difficulty in getting and keeping staff that it was an impossible juggling act to make visits at more consistent times. I asked if the teatime person could stay with my dad and ensure that he ate something but we saw on the CCTV that they rarely did.
Dad had started getting up and dressed in the middle of the night, not an easy task with his night bag in place. Sybil phoned to say she was worried because he sometimes phoned her in the middle of the night. I looked at his phone records and sure enough, he was phoning her as often as twenty or thirty times a day, frequently in the middle of the night, poor woman. I spoke to Dad about it and he seemed unaware that he was doing it. I had no idea what to do about it. We couldn't remove the phone or switch it off as it was a safety line.
By the spring of 2022 he was very frail and skinny. It occurred to me that he was deliberately not eating to avoid the toilet accidents. Either me or my brother would call every day and make sure he ate at least something but in reality he hardly ate anything at all. If we cooked him a proper breakfast or visited at lunchtime he would eat nothing for the rest of the day. The final appointment for his dementia assessment was still several weeks away.
One morning in June while in France I checked in on the CCTV and was horrified to see Dad wandering around in the living room, wearing nothing other than his shirt and desperately fiddling with his overnight bag. Moments later, Clare the cleaner arrived, along with her young daughter. She was an absolute star, took Dad into the bathroom leaving the little girl in front of the TV, took control of the situation and sent for the downstairs care team to deal with what was an emergency. We spoke on the phone and I called my brother who went straight round.
Edward had not removed or emptied Dad's overnight catheter bag although he wrote in the log that he had. He had not washed the dishes although he wrote that he had and on giving Dad his tablets they were left on the bedside table without a drink to take them with. He wrote that Dad had taken them but they were still there when my brother arrived.
I made a phone call to the care company, who were very apologetic and Edward never came again. I booked myself on the next flight back to the UK.
I arrived at his flat to find him sitting in his chair with poo all over his hands. There were two people in the bathroom, one of the office staff from downstairs and a maintenance man who was trying to unblock the toilet. The bowl was full and he was not happy. It looked like Dad had dropped a whole toilet roll into it and it had been blocked for over twenty four hours. The morning carer had reported it to the office - but she had not done anything to clean Dad up.
I pulled the orange emergency cord. One of the downstairs care team came straight away and thank goodness she was one of the nicer ones. The toilet was by now functioning again and she took Dad into the bathroom, cleaned him up put him into fresh clothes.
The next morning I had a phone call from the carer. This particular woman was one of the few I had any confidence in and she was concerned that on showering him she had found a bad pressure sore at the bottom of his spine. How on earth had this not been spotted and dealt with before when they were supposed to be showering him at least twice a week?
She gave me the number for the team of district nurses so that I could arrange a visit. It seems that district nurses were now centrally managed and their services eked out according to need; they are no longer attached to a GP surgery. The young man that took my call took a little persuading but accepted the urgency and arranged for a district nurse to go and see him that day.
At around five pm in the afternoon the nurse phoned. I presumed she was reporting on how she had got on but no, she was reporting that she hadn't been to see him because she had run out of time to complete all her visits and the paperwork as well. Clearly paperwork was more important than a frail old man with a painful and infected wound. I was furious but I remained polite on the phone and another visit was scheduled for the next day. Tubes of ointment and packs of dressings arrived at the flat for subsequent visits.
Early one morning a few days later I had a call from the care team downstairs. Dad had pulled the orange cord in the early hours of the morning and they arrived at his flat to find him in a crumpled heap in his bedroom, almost fully dressed. It sounded like he had got up in the middle of the night again and in the process of grappling with the catheter while trying to get dressed he fell and couldn't get up. He had managed to crawl to the orange cord. They called for an ambulance because they couldn't get him up. The ambulance team spotted his pressure sore and took him to hospital.
He was not ill or injured but once in hospital the doctors decided to keep him in to fix his pressure sore and address the fact that he was seriously underweight. Either me or my brother visited him every day. We observed that food was left uneaten, the special nutrient drinks were not drunk and things started to go missing. He was always in his bed. Five times we arrived to find he had been moved to a different ward, obviously in the evening, no explanation given. He was never out of bed and his pyjamas were dirty. His holdall of clean clothes, toiletries and shaver had gone missing. A bundle of soiled pyjamas were stuffed in his bedside cupboard. I asked a passing nurse if he had been got out of bed and mobilised and she said no, according to his notes he couldn't walk. He could walk perfectly well, with a walking frame, when he was admitted, could make himself a cup of tea or get himself a drink and potter around his flat. Ten days of being completely bed bound in hospital had robbed him of his ability to walk. I considered taking his walking frame to the hospital and trying to get him to walk myself but thought better of it. That too would probably go missing before long.
I managed to speak to the ward doctor and he said he would get the physios to call and assess him. This was one of the many things where we were not informed what was happening. It took some detective work to find out that two physios had been, assessed him, declared that he was beyond being able to walk now because of his frailty and the pressure sore and left it at that.
One evening on the ward a keen looking young woman, (I presumed a student nurse) came along with a clipboard. She asked Dad if he had been to the toilet today and if he had had a wee and he smiled and said yes. She asked if he had enjoyed his dinner and he said yes. The reality was that he couldn't get to the toilet at all because he could no longer walk and wouldn't have had a wee because he was catheterised. His dinner had been taken away uneaten as I arrived. I thought there’s no wonder he’s in a mess if that information was in his records.
Our daily visits told us that he was fading away before our very eyes and then his dental plate went missing. After that he couldn't eat at all, and couldn't drink from a cup, spout or straw. I had a melt down in the ward and was whisked away to a "family room". The hospital social worker and a ward nurse were called and I was told that Dad could be discharged because there was nothing more they could do for him. This was the first I had heard about it. Dad was clearly unable to look after himself now that he couldn't walk and needed a place in a care home with nursing facilities but there were no places available locally. The social worker referred to Dad as one of their "bed blockers".
When I protested about not being kept informed of decisions, even though either me or my brother visited every day, the nurse said that although we had POA for health and welfare Dad was deemed to have "capacity" because there was no mention of dementia on his file; the diagnosis was not there.
This explained a lot. When they were moving him from one ward to another it was in the bed he now lived in and if he was awake they might ask him if he had everything and he would say yes. Because of his dementia he wouldn't have a clue. How on earth they lost his teeth was a mystery. I asked the ward sister if there was any way they could be found. She callously said the most likely scenario is that he took them out and dropped them in the bed and they would have been gathered up with soiled sheets.
I looked this nurse straight in the eye and asked her how she would feel if this was her dad. Without his full set of teeth he could barely speak properly, he couldn't drink and eating even a sandwich was hard work. As he was now unable to walk how could I take him to the dentist to get his teeth replaced? There was a momentary flicker of empathy and compassion on her face until it disappeared and she adopted the almost universal stance of all the staff I had come across in the hospital. A false cheeriness as they tried to grapple with an impossibly overloaded demand for beds, constant turnover of patients and a level of nursing that fell short of what the patients need, and they knew it. An enormous amount of time seemed to be spent tapping all their actions into a computer but clearly there were no records of what had happened to my dad's dental plate.
On the day that Dad was finally discharged, three weeks after his arrival, he was little more than skin and bone and couldn't really speak. He still had the painful pressure sore. His room in the care home was grim but the staff were kind and very positive about his prospects. They had had residents in the same condition as Dad before and managed to turn them around. I doubted that very much and sure enough, he continued to decline and died after a week in that awful room.
I raised some of the issues I had experienced with our MP but it fell on deaf ears. He said the government, at that point led by the self serving elitist Boris Johnson, had plans to address Social Care but in the meantime did we want to make a complaint against the hospital, the care company and the housing facility? All he was interested in was blame.
We were all exhausted, worn out with battling a broken system where too many people either didn't care or were unable to provide an acceptable service. No complaints would ever bring my dad back.
At the funeral many people remarked that 93¾ was a "good age" but in my view there was not much good about it. The last three years were awful for him and for us. He was scammed mercilessly by heartless people cashing in on his frailty and confusion. Covid lockdowns left him isolated and difficult for us to support him. Above all, he and we were badly let down by carers, doctors, nurses and other professionals that didn't care enough about the vulnerable people they were looking after.
Andy Burnham sounds like he really cares about Social Care and I wish him all the luck in the world in sorting out the mess.
