Northerner
Admin (Retired)
- Relationship to Diabetes
- Type 1
NHS Continuing Healthcare: many elderly people are unaware they could be entitled to help with care home fees.
Nine years ago, at the age of 81, George Spencer had a massive stroke that left him in need of round-the-clock care.
He is unaware of his surroundings and unable to communicate; he is fed and medicated through a tube because he can?t swallow, is doubly incontinent, at high risk of pressure sores, and in constant danger of suffocating, choking, falling out of bed or slipping from his bath chair. He is largely bed-bound, and staff in his Suffolk nursing home use a hoist to move him.
The man who received the Burma, Africa and Italy Stars for his service as a radio operator and air gunner in Sunderland Flying Boats during the war has been reduced, says his son Stephen, to ?a helpless skeletal figure?.
For the past nine years, Mr Spencer?s wife, Ethel, who is 88, has had to sacrifice the comfortable retirement she and her husband had saved for all their lives in order to fund the ?600 weekly cost of his care and accommodation. This is a familiar story: thousands of elderly people have had to sell their homes and cash in their savings to fund care in their old age (a problem which the Government is attempting to address with its proposed ?75,000 cap on social care payments).
Yet for people with serious medical conditions such as Mr Spencer, there exists a little-known ? and, it seems, little-publicised ? potential source of financial support, NHS Continuing Healthcare (NHS CHC).
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/health/e...ng-out-on-NHS-cash-to-pay-care-home-fees.html
Nine years ago, at the age of 81, George Spencer had a massive stroke that left him in need of round-the-clock care.
He is unaware of his surroundings and unable to communicate; he is fed and medicated through a tube because he can?t swallow, is doubly incontinent, at high risk of pressure sores, and in constant danger of suffocating, choking, falling out of bed or slipping from his bath chair. He is largely bed-bound, and staff in his Suffolk nursing home use a hoist to move him.
The man who received the Burma, Africa and Italy Stars for his service as a radio operator and air gunner in Sunderland Flying Boats during the war has been reduced, says his son Stephen, to ?a helpless skeletal figure?.
For the past nine years, Mr Spencer?s wife, Ethel, who is 88, has had to sacrifice the comfortable retirement she and her husband had saved for all their lives in order to fund the ?600 weekly cost of his care and accommodation. This is a familiar story: thousands of elderly people have had to sell their homes and cash in their savings to fund care in their old age (a problem which the Government is attempting to address with its proposed ?75,000 cap on social care payments).
Yet for people with serious medical conditions such as Mr Spencer, there exists a little-known ? and, it seems, little-publicised ? potential source of financial support, NHS Continuing Healthcare (NHS CHC).
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/health/e...ng-out-on-NHS-cash-to-pay-care-home-fees.html