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News and Comment June 2013

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6 June (Part 1) - Ring any BELLs?

Care homeDire predictions of imminent death on Broadway were excluded from yesterday’s readers’ comments. To do otherwise might be tempting fate and one reason for publishing the Broadway pictures is to try to make things safer by illustrating that putting your baby and buggy into the path of a bus is not a good idea. The Broadway scheme may not have intended to put lives in danger but that is what ill thought out plans and policies tend to do.

Could Bexley council’s budget cuts be a case in point? They happily squander a £3·5 million grant on a Magic Roundabout and equally happily cut services wherever they can, especially those hidden from most people’s view. The delivery of hot meals to the housebound disabled, squeezing the domiciliary care budget paying staff at a minimum level and nothing for travelling while on duty. And budget cuts to care home providers which forced some to halve wages. Could these hidden cuts result in death too?

What if a reduced budget caused staff cuts to the point that vital personnel are left on duty alone and then they fall ill, or simply need the loo? And just at the wrong moment, the alarm sounds while they are locked in the lavatory. What if an elderly Tom, Dick or Barbara closely confined in their little haven of care pressed the emergency button in vain which no one heard because the call of nature took precedence? And someone died.

Suppose something like that happened in Bexley; what do you think they might do?

My guess based on recent history is that the bean counter who created the fatal situation would immediately sack the person who went to the toilet. The police would take an interest in an unexplained death but drop the case as soon as they realised their friends in the council were implicated and the council would stonewall the family. FOIs would claim ‘not in the public interest’ immunity. Then when the case died down a manager would get promoted and the responsible councillor would be manoeuvred into a safer seat to preserve his skin at the next election.

Just wondering, obviously, things like that simply don’t happen in Teresa Town; or do they?

 

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