Comment: Striving for best possible care is what we expect (From Herald Series)

Comment: Striving for best possible care is what we expect

9:00am Tuesday 12th March 2013 in News

Unsettling at best is the news that half of the inspections of care homes in Oxfordshire were failures this year.
Many, it’s true, will have fallen down for failing to meet technical specifications that do not realistically reflect the actual quality of care in a home.
But some will have failed precisely because the general level of care – and ‘care’ is the word – fell short of what residents and patients should deserve and expect.
However, that is not the point of this editorial comment. What is is that county councillor Jim Couchman of Oxfordshire’s joint health overview and scrutiny committee would appear to believe that this is in fact an acceptable level of failure.
He says: “To expect perfection is optimistic”.”
Really? Surely where the health and welfare of our senior citizens is concerned, ‘perfection’ is the very least we should guarantee.
It’s what we pay for. But clearly if such an ideal is not considered worthy of the effort to start with, is it then any great surprise that some of our care homes do fail to pass?