Tag: health
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Living each day as best you can
I remember vividly the first time I asked my dad if he was feeling ok. He’d come down to London on his own to watch a rugby match at Wembley back in 2014. A week before my mum had called me about it in a total panic at the idea of him travelling alone and…
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Life after death
Right up until the moment my dad breathed his last breath in a bed in Royal Bolton Hospital, he was so identifiably, undeniably my dad – albeit my dad with dementia and dying. The noises he made when the nurses moved him. The way he coughed. The way he occasionally emerged briefly out of his…
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Janet and Bill
On Tuesday, Janet and her husband Bill received the news they’d been dreading. It was confirmed she likely had Alzheimer’s. There was some ambiguity, suggesting it might have been ‘mild cognitive impairment.’ Janet’s symptoms were mild. Not so much forgetfulness, more….. withdrawnness and an occasional fuzziness. The diagnosis wasn’t exactly a surprise. They had both…
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Bringing life to years, not just years to life
Every winter many older people find themselves in hospital, for a variety of presenting reasons, and the news is full of stories of hospitals unable to discharge patients because of the lack of social care support for them to return home, and of declaring emergencies as they run out of beds. It is this situation…
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…and health
This morning the health think tank the Kings Fund published a valuable report, calling on a focus on primary and community based ‘health and care’. The report begins with a welcome and helpful clarification that social care is a system in its own right with its own purpose that extends way beyond maintaining or improving physical…