Week Three Newsletter
Here’s what you will find in CG Editions: Week Three – Elder Care
Welcome to CG Editions – Week Three: Elder Care
Older adults are at increased risk for severe outcomes and death from COVID-19, with individuals over 85 at greatest risk.
Care homes, specifically, have been hit hard, although the proportion of care home-related COVID-19 deaths to total COVID-19 deaths vary internationally (e.g. 32% in the US (despite accounting for only 4% of infections) to over 75% percent in Australia).
The most common solution has been to lock down these facilities to outside visitors to prevent introducing the virus into vulnerable communities. However, what that approach failed to account for was residents’ very real social-emotional needs which are met by physical contact with loved ones – and how denying people that connection can also result in sickness and death.
We explore this contradiction in this week’s issue of CG Editions.
- Editor-In-Chief, Jay Bhattacharya, recounts his experience of struggling to stay connected with a dear friend living in a care home over the past year
- Professor Alberto Giubilini explores whether our treatment of the elderly during the pandemic could be more accurately characterized as public health or paternalism
- The Hastings Group has generously allowed us to reprint their article ‘Vaccinated and Still Isolated: The Ethics of Overprotecting Nursing Home Residents’
- Narrative non-fiction writer, AJ Kay, sits down with Angela Lanyon – a 90-year-old UK writer and poet – to talk about the last 14 months set against her lifetime of experience
- Bristol Care Homes Chairman, Geoff Crocker, explains Effective Targeted Protection of Care Homes
- In Part Three of his six-part series, ‘Making Policy Better’, Professor Paul Dolan explains how a full accounting of lockdowns requires us to acknowledge the benefits, as well as the harms
And our CG Video production team presents two new films featuring:
- Former NHS employee Jane Smith, who recounts her heartbreaking story of being separated from her mum – a care home resident – and describes her efforts to bring awareness to the injustice, as well as the cost to her own mental health, and
- Julia Jones, co-founder of ‘John’s Campaign’ who talks about the cessation of visiting rights for care home residents during the COVID-19 pandemic and how (and why) the wishes of residents and their families need to be respected
As always, we invite you to check out our Get Involved page, FAQs, and About Us sections, where you can find specifics about who we are, what we believe, and what we aim to accomplish. You can also follow us on Twitter.