How You Can Help Elderly Relatives Escape from Hospital
An item in the Guardian this week has the strange title, “How you can help elderly relatives escape from hospital.” You get Emily Dickinson’s thrill from the word “escape” and the instructional tone, but it’s also slightly troubling in that you wonder why anyone would need to escape from hospital, a place designed for wellness and recovery. It brings to mind dark hospital fantasies like One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, The Kingdom, and Toby Litt’s Hospital. To be honest, I prefer Scrubs.
Yet here we are. The NHS in Britain is struggling after 12 years of Tory austerity exacerbated by Hostile Environment policies and Brexit. Equally frightening is a staffing and facilities crisis in social care. The twin crises have led to a Kafkaesque situation where maybe a third of hospital beds are occupied by people who don’t need to be in hospital. They’re no longer ill but they can’t leave because there’s no facility in social care to help them with essential mental health or mobility issues.
The newspaper item consists of two letters from people who have helped their relatives escape. One writer describes how they registered with the Office of the Public Guardian to get jurisdiction over their mother’s care. The other describes how they simply bundled their aunt into a warm dressing gown and left.
It’s a perfect illustration of the two main modes of escape. You can use knowledge and patience to deploy bureaucracy against the force that holds you, or you can be agile and just go. The former is often smarter and can solve longer-term problems like what to do when you’re all out of runway or if they come running after you. But, oh, the courage and dignity of the latter! I’ve done both.
This hospital example also reminds us that an escape isn’t just good for the person doing the scarpering, but good for everyone else too. Those vacated hospital beds were doubtless desperately needed. Escape can be socially useful as well as personally liberating. Better you do something useful or beautiful for the world than tirelessly punching a clock, for example.
I suppose this is as good a time as any to remind UK-based readers to vote against the Conservative Party at the next available opportunity.
About Robert Wringham
Robert Wringham is the editor of New Escapologist. He also writes books and articles. Read more at wringham.co.uk
My first job out of uni was with the Office of the Public Guardian. It was a hellish place where every meme about the futility of work, mismanagement, endless bureaucracy and crushed, soulless workers was applicable. Ironic that it does offer people a chance to escape by the service it provides (if they can wait 10-12 weeks processing time), but those working there are trapped and in desperate need of an escape route themselves.
I’d never name the public sector organisation I worked for (not that you shouldn’t have; I’ve just slammed mine online and in print for years) but it was a similar situation for us too. Over all, we were slow but generally helped things eventually. You wouldn’t want to lose it. At the same time though, there were so many parts of the machine that were ill-advised or historic hangovers or just plain stupid. And there was no need for expensive, life-destroying offices either since it could all have been done remotely. The sense of lost years inside the machine was palpable and deeply depressing.