Writing is writing, right? Someone in ‘Good Will Hunting’ said that, if you can do it, you should, on behalf of all those who can’t. Well this link to my other blog, my other life, is my writerly way of speaking for those who can’t. Others have done the same. Journalists have made erudite comment. The BBC gave us the material. But we all knew it was happening, somewhere in our souls, our collective psyche. We knew that we could not always trust humans to act with humanity, or decency, or even just plain neglectfully. We knew that some would see an opportunity for self aggrandisement, satisfaction, ego inflation. But as long as there were systems in place to inspect and regulate, it was not our business.
Well, maybe it is our business. Maybe, since we pay the regulators and the professionals and the carers, we have not just a right but a duty to take a look from time to time. To poke our real-world noses into systems and say that we don’t care what boxes are ticked, this doesn’t smell right. Maybe we should all make friends with our local care homes, nursing homes, and community hostels and offer some home-baked perspective and reality.
Related articles
- Panorama: Undercover Care, BBC One, review (telegraph.co.uk)
- Winterbourne View In Bristol Patient Abuse Caught On Film Labelled ‘Torture’ (femaleimagination.wordpress.com)
- BBC expose of care home abuse was public interest journalism incarnate (guardian.co.uk)
Dr Suzanne Conboy-Hill 
I didn’t yet watch the programme but the post on your other blog is so well-written, and so restrained yet focused that it elicits a very powerful emotional reaction. Thanks for featuring it.
Working in business rather than social services can make someone like me fairly ignorant about the suffering and abuses that go on outside the corporate world.
Thank you, Cathryn. I think what was most shocking about this was that the staff had no need for ignorance, and so it must have been so much more about malevolence. I don’t accept low pay as a factor, many of our staff are low paid and relentlessly brilliant.