Plight of bedridden dementia patient highlights flaws in Governments home-care ambitions

By Patrick Sawer 804PM GMT thirteen March 2010

Linda, and her mom Evelyn, at home in Staines Photo DAVID ROSE

The 85-year-old widow, who suffers from assertive vascular dementia, cannot feed herself and it all reliant for her majority simple needs on her carer, her eldest child, Linda Cockshaw.

Under Whitehall manners if a person"s healing needs are judged to be serious their main caring should be paid for by the NHS, in any case of the person"s income.

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But inexplicably, following a short assessment, her internal Primary Care Trust deserted the focus by Mrs Evans"s family for what is well known as Continuing Healthcare.

Mr Cockshaw and her dual sisters, Glenys Robertson and Jenny James, were stunned. They had high hopes that their mother, a former Red Cross proffer whose father Lesley, a late polite servant, died fourteen years ago, would validate for the funding.

Mrs James, 54, pronounced "She is utterly contingent on my sister"s smashing care. There"s zero left of the Mum solely her earthy entity. But the comment for Continuing Healthcare was laughable. The helper assessor who came outlayed usually thirty seconds with Mum, prolonged sufficient usually to check we unequivocally were caring for someone, but not sufficient to have any genuine judgement.

"The rest of the time she outlayed in the kitchen asking us questions. We probably didn"t contend the right things to capacitate her to parasite her boxes."

To validate for Continuing Healthcare patients have to be deemed in "severe" need to dual out of twelve intensity "care domains" or categories. But Mrs Evans, who is additionally doubly incontinent, was judged to be serious in usually one difficulty cognition.

Her mobility needs were assessed as "moderate", notwithstanding the actuality Mrs Cockshaw and her sisters need to have use of a bed raise in sequence to move her, as she is unqualified of light herself at all.

Mrs Evans grown insanity in 2006, after the suffered from a serious bug she picked up in sanatorium after being certified following a fit.

As a result, Mrs Cockshaw gave up her pursuit as an bureau earthy education instructor to yield full time caring for her mother, relocating her in to her home in Staines, on the corner of west London.

Now elderly 62, she fears she might not be means to lift on with the strenuous charge of seeking after her mom for most years longer. Her center sister Glenys, 59, suffers from behind problems and would find it tough to cope with the earthy bid compulsory to lift her mother.

The family would onslaught to find the �41,000 a year compulsory to compensate for Mrs James to be looked after by a dilettante in isolation carer.

Mrs James, her youngest daughter, lives 125 miles afar in Grantham, Lincolnshire. She pronounced "We wish to keep Mum at home for as prolonged as we can. That caring should be supposing as a right."

Val Lloyd, Head of Continuing Care at NHS Surrey, shielded the preference not to endowment Continuing Healthcare to Mrs Evans.

She pronounced "I assimilate how formidable it can be when applications are declined, however any decisions we have are formed on the result of the particular comment and inhabitant criteria that all NHS organisations follow. If Mrs Evans, or her family, feels the incident has changed, we will of march prepare for a reassessment to take place."