Do you know who your neighbour is ?
We have become an isolated society and many people don’t even know who they are living next door to.
4 years has passed and I see little evidence of change. What do you think? Let me know your thoughts. Once again is this just a rant from a politician with a big heart and no budget?
An article in the Daily Telegraph in 2012 stated that we all need to all do more to look after our elderly neighbours to prevent them having to go into residential care. Norman Lamb the Care Minister at the time called for us all to help, how many have?
Were at the Government passing the buck in order to save money or should we all be doing more for those around us in need of support.?
We are living in a materialistic society of have now pay later and as such we all work longer hours to afford what we already have. The previous generations had less as there was less to have.
Decades ago it looked down upon if your wife to needed to work as it was deemed the role of the male to be the breadwinner. This freed women to care for their elderly relatives and not juggle work and family. How times have changed with the Government almost penalising mothers for not working.
Let me know your thoughts?
People should do more to help elderly neighbours and ease the pressure on care homes, the care minister has said. Greater community support would prevent pensioners living a “dismal existence” and going into care unnecessarily.
Local councils were called upon to rebuild a “neighbourly resilience”. Mr Lamb warned that any new cap to care home fees were “not a panacea”, and more needed to be done to prevent so many elderly people going into care at all. Did he for see the social care crisis we now find ourselves facing ?
He also warned that a limit “does not remove all financial pressures”, saying that people would still have to pay for the residential component of living in a home.
Too many pensioners are being pushed into care when more could be done to keep them at home, living independent lives, said Mr Lamb.
“We all have a part to play. In this way, we can make the system sustainable, and it can be a more decent society, a less neglectful society than we sometimes experience where we just expect the state to do everything,” he said.
“With the right support and the right community resilience, and a rebuilding of the neighbour support that used to be there, more people could stay in their own homes for longer.
“We have lost the extended family because families have become dispersed. We need to rebuild that neighbourly resilience that helps people stay independent.
“If someone is living on their own never seeing anyone, that is a dismal existence, and it often ends up with it all collapsing and them going into a care home.”
