Dementia Care in Hospital

Debate between Theresa Villiers and Richard Foord

Wednesday 6th March 2024 Commons Chamber

[Theresa Villiers (Chipping Barnet) (Con)]

My constituent Lisa Rutter is the founder of the charity Dementia Club UK, which hosts events in Barnet for people with dementia and their families, to provide support, advice and much-needed time out of the house to socialise with other people who are coping with similar life experiences. This work gives Lisa great insight into dementia care and the pressures on unpaid carers, and she asked me to meet a group of carers over Zoom to hear about their relatives’ traumatic experiences when admitted to hospital. I found the meeting deeply disturbing, which is why I applied for this debate.

In the time available, I can only include brief points about each case. I cannot hope to convey the emotional impact of the stories as told by the carers themselves, and I cannot hope to get across their real distress and anger that their loved ones had been let down, but I hope to give the House an indication of the seriousness of the problem.

I will start with Lisa’s own story. Her mother, Tasoulla Gavriel, was admitted to Barnet Hospital with covid in November 2020. Sadly, she died shortly afterwards. Tasoulla was a lovely lady, and I met her on a number of occasions. She was assessed by the hospital to be an eight on the Rockwood scale, meaning that she was viewed as severely frail and approaching the end of her life. Lisa believes that this diagnosis was entirely wrong. Her mother was sitting up and alert when admitted, and she did not have serious comorbidities, apart from advanced dementia, which meant she needed help with eating.

When Lisa was told by the hospital that her mother needed an oxygen mask, she asked for Mrs Gavriel to be put in hand mittens to prevent her from pulling off the mask and harming her treatment. The hospital refused, on the basis that this did not accord with hospital policy because it amounted to a deprivation of liberty. The hospital decided that it was neither proportionate nor in Mrs Gavriel’s best interests for her to be given mittens. That is despite mittens being used when Mrs Gavriel had been admitted the previous year for a hip operation. Lisa sincerely believes that mittens could have saved her mother’s life.

Another deeply distressing aspect of this case is that covid visitor restrictions meant that Lisa had only very limited time with her mother in hospital. I raised this in Parliament at the time, urging visitor restrictions to be eased for patients with dementia. I very much welcomed the subsequent introduction of greater flexibility for people to spend time with their loved ones in hospital. We must never again return to restrictions of the sort we saw during the pandemic.

Some of the group I spoke to did not want to be named, so I will simply refer to them as Carers 1 to 5. Unlike the others, Carer 1 is not a constituent and his experience does not relate to my local Barnet Hospital, but I do not want to leave him out. He emphasised how crucial it is that people with dementia continue to move and walk, if they are to stave off further loss of cognition, but he told me that staff at the hospital to which his wife was admitted refused to help her to walk. Even more worrying, he had to intervene twice to prevent a nurse from giving her the wrong dose of medication. Had he not spotted the mistake, a potentially lethal dose could have been administered.

[Richard Foord (Tiverton and Honiton) (LD)]

I congratulate the right hon. Lady on securing this significant debate, as dementia is going to affect so many people’s lives in the coming decades, as more and more people are of retirement age. In Devon, the dementia specialist Jonathan Hanbury has suggested that we should place more funding and focus on community hospitals, community treatments and community services, so that people can keep their brain agile further upstream. He suggests that the NHS’s focus on funding for acute hospital services and expensive drugs misses the value of prevention. Does the right hon. Lady agree?

[Theresa Villiers]

Those are very valid points. It is important to keep people out of hospital for as often as possible, but that is particularly the case with dementia patients, given the dislocation and insecurity that comes with moving them to a different environment. Measures to keep people healthier for longer and to deliver care via the primary care system rather than in acute hospitals are an important way to address some of the problems I am outlining.

Police Stations

Debate between Theresa Villiers and Richard Foord

Monday 10th July 2023 Commons Chamber

[Theresa Villiers]

I am very much aware of the concern felt in many parts of London about the tri-borough policing model, and I think it is important to review it.

I turn back to the idea that new bases for police officers could be found. There is still real uncertainty about where these would be and what they would involve. The suggestion remains that a new base for police officers could be in a corner of a library or the backroom in a high street shop, but providing a base for police officers is not a straightforward matter. Officers have access to highly sensitive personal data, and they hold evidence from cases for which it is vital that they keep rigorous and reliable records of custody. Moreover, some police equipment is potentially harmful, such as tasers, and it would be dangerous if this kind of kit fell into the wrong hands. Special storage facilities would need to be built in new alternative accommodation. They could not just set up a few lockers in a local library. Flogging off existing police stations could end up being a false economy if multiple new premises for ward teams in different areas need to be bought and fitted up to replace them.

I also want to highlight the sense of confidence that the presence of a police station gives people—a sense that would be entirely lost in the areas where police stations are currently under threat. For example, the East London Advertiser reported that people felt that police station closures in Tower Hamlets meant that the area felt less safe. Complete loss of the remaining police presence in Chipping Barnet town centre would inevitably leave my constituents feeling more insecure. Serious concerns have been reported to me about crime, thefts and antisocial behaviour in Barnet High Street, including what appears to have been a serious assault that took place recently outside McDonald’s. The sale of the police station and its complete closure would make it harder to grapple with the existing crime issues in the local area.

These worrying local crime problems were discussed recently at a meeting I attended of the High Barnet police community action panel, under the chairmanship of my constituent Mahender Khari. I take this opportunity to pay tribute to him, and to everyone who chairs or takes part in police action panels in my constituency. They do a vital job. That includes Councillor Jennifer Grocock, who has done excellent and innovative work on making neighbourhood police teams more visible by involving them in Barnet Council’s community safety hubs, which were pioneered by the previous Conservative administration in Barnet.

I am also worried about the impact of police station closures on the viability of our high streets. We all know that town centres have suffered in recent years for a range of reasons, particularly the big shift to online retail. It has become harder and harder to get footfall to high streets, and I fear that losing police stations could lead to a further hollowing out of our struggling town centres, adding to the list of vacant buildings.

[Richard Foord (Tiverton and Honiton) (LD)]

I thank the right hon. Member for her speech and for giving way. Last November, Devon and Cornwall police launched an online poll using SurveyMonkey, and invited the public in Devon and Cornwall to vote to reopen three front desks out of a list of 44. I was pleased to help promote that poll and to attend the reopening of Tiverton police station—and I hope to attend that of Honiton later this year—but does she think that we should not have to fill in SurveyMonkey polls to get to speak to a human being?

[Theresa Villiers]

The hon. Member makes the important point that much of what we are talking about is the ability of the police to maintain appropriate contacts with members of the public. That distance from members of the public is one of the problems that the Met is grappling with, and I think it is useful to hear his point of view about police stations and police services elsewhere in the country.

During this difficult era for high streets, we should try to enhance the visible presence of public services, not scale it back. That is another good reason to maintain the police station estate, both in Barnet and in other towns and cities. In her report on the Met, Baroness Casey highlighted that station closures are likely to have affected efficiency, with police spending more time travelling, and longer police response times. Recent research by Elisa Facchetti, published by the Centre for Economic Policy Research, pointed to a correlation between reduction in police stations and poorer crime clear-up rates. That suggests that the capacity to collect the evidence needed to solve crimes might be impeded by police having to travel increased distances, although I acknowledge that many other variables could be relevant, and it is difficult to establish a clear causative link.

Four important recent developments make this debate very timely, and mean that the Mayor of London should reverse his closure programme. First, the Government have delivered on the Conservative manifesto pledge to recruit 20,000 additional police officers. That means that the Met now has more uniformed officers than at any time in its history—and we need somewhere to put them. That radically changes the situation we faced in 2017, when the Mayor wielded the axe against Barnet police station and others.

Secondly, Baroness Casey’s damning report on the Met cited the closure of 124 police stations as one of the reasons behind what she describes as “eroded frontline policing”. She concluded that the combined impact of various efficiency measures, including police station closures, had led to

“a more dispersed and hands-off training experience for new recruits and existing personnel, which gives them less sense of belonging to the Met…greater distances for Response officers and Neighbourhood Policing teams to travel”,

and

“fewer points of accessible contact for the public”.

At a time when culture and conduct at the Met have come under huge scrutiny, we should not persist in making disposals from the police station estate—disposals that are calculated to make officers less connected to one another, more isolated and more distant from the communities they serve.