Glen Campbell has Alzheimer’s, this is sad, but another positive piece of publicity to help understanding and greater acceptance of the disease. The more we read and see of people we can identify with succumbing to dementia, the better we will be at accepting those in society with it. Glen lives in America, but everywhere in the world has the same problems with an ageing population and greater numbers of dementia sufferers. Elderly care homes in the UK are similar to those in the USA and have been around for a while, but there are countries in the world who have traditionally not had residential care homes for the elderly, who are starting to consider the benefits to their own changing societies. Elderly care homes UK wide have been around since the second world war in some numbers. To start with, they were mostly set up on some type of charitable basis, with philanthropic people as owners. They are now very much a business, although with slightly less attractive profit margins of late. The industry was poorly regulated for many years and unscrupulous owners of residential care homes UK could get away with providing a pretty basic service. These days there is a well organised Regulatory system, although some say, not good enough, checking that residential care homes UK do things properly and with the customer’s welfare at the forefront of the decision making processes. There is also a growing amount of competition, forcing providers to provide better services and keeping prices at a reasonable level. Unfortunately, that level is too high for most people. Good elderly care homes UK can cost around 1000 per week for intensive nursing care. At 52,000 per year, this is out of the range of most people’s savings. Selling your home is the only way to pay for it at the moment and even then it will only provide for a few years of care. The public purse funds up to about 550 per week, but only if the client has no means of paying themselves. Good care providers cannot run their businesses on this income †not if they maintain the staffing levels and services to a high degree. This all seems very expensive, but if you were to employ 2 nurses on an annual basis to look after someone at home, therefore providing 24 hour care, the costs would be greater than 52,000 per year. The Government has recently suggested capping the costs to the individual, so making things a little fairer, but the question still remains of who is going to pay the balance. There is only one option †the taxpayer. And with the ageing population increasing and the tax paying younger generation decreasing in numbers, this will be a taxing problem for governments in the years ahead. The problem has been consistently pushed to the back burner as a vote loser for the people who have to decide how to deal with it, but one day the problem will be too big to go away.
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