Authors Electric

  Plaid Cymru leader Liz Saville Roberts struggled  to hold back her tears at Prime Ministers Questions 5.1.2022 when she spoke of her fear that her mother's dementia diagnosis  would also mean separation from her family when she was moved into a care home. Now Liz is one of four MPs ready to introduce legislation  to ensure we all have the right to maintain contact with a family carer wherever we are in the health and care system Today, Monday May 8 th is National Help-Out day -- which may well mean that by tomorrow, when this blogpost is published (March 9th 2023), everyone’s impulses to benevolence will be as exhausted as the final damp squib from a village playing-field party. So maybe I’ll pitch this request as enlightened self-interest... If you have a stroke today, or a traumatic brain injury, if you develop a cognitive disability (such as a dementia) or any one of the array of incurable illnesses which will make you progressively less and less able to fe...

On March 9th last year (2022)  I travelled to Westminster with friends and fellow-campaigners, lobbying for the legal right to a care supporter -- caregiver, care partner... The terminology doesn't matter too much. It's the right to have someone who we love to be with us in a time of need. This might be when we're in a hospital, a care home, a mental health unit or anywhere else in our fragmented health and care system where we're likely to feel powerless and afraid. I wrote a blog before I left  home , listing just a few of the unseen people who would be travelling to London with me.  I mentioned Daniel, repeatedly put into ‘seclusion’ in a mental health unit when he cried out for his wife. I remembered Riya, a woman younger than me, struggling to recover from a stroke among people who didn’t speak her language or understand the ritual dimension of her food needs. Riya was lucky to be alive but her doctors found her apathetic and her family were certain that she needed...

Lunna House, Shetland, overlooking the anchorage This week began 9 days ago. I was self-isolating, having tested positive a couple of days before, and I’d just made the terrible mistake of saying aloud to Francis how conducive I hoped this was going to be to a quiet spell of writing. I’d been playing my usual game of not exactly mentioning the current project, clocking up a few hundred words here and there and hoping they would turn into something. They’d crawled nicely past the 30,000 sticky point and my characters had anchored in the evocative West Lunna Voe in Shetland. They and I were both eager to know what would happen to them next. A spell of enforced seclusion seemed the ideal opportunity to find out. What actually happened was a message from Delyth, a dedicated, passionate, dementia nurse in Wales introducing Liz Saville Roberts MP who was offering to support the John's Campaign on-going struggle for the rights of people in hospitals and care homes to maintain their rela...