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By Root 885 0

winters. The police picked him up after an hour or so and he was very impressed that they were kind and didn’t beat him. He also thanked us explicitly for our kind hospitality during his stay. He found that English people were very nice but some of the residents here were a little strange. He had decided to return to Belarus, as travelling wasn’t really his thing. He then invited us all to stay at his home at any time and told us that we would all be made very welcome. Apparently, his mother made the best goulash in the whole village. Peter gave us each a kiss on both cheeks and left. I dread to think how much it cost the NHS to keep him on an acute psychiatric ward for five days but probably more than Peter could earn in a year back home. Ludmila was very smug. ‘Like I am saying, all Belarus man the same. Lithuanians man even worse.’

Granny dumping

Granny dumping is the act of getting your elderly relative admitted to hospital in the build-up to Christmas so that the rest of the family can have a less stressful holiday period. I remember the more senior doctors moaning about granny dumping in the build-up to my first Christmas after I qualified. I didn’t believe that it could actually happen, but every year before Christmas there is an influx of elderly patients whose families can’t cope with them any more or who are jetting off to a converted farmhouse in Tuscany that doesn’t have a stairlift.

Granny dumping is a very harsh expression and the actual individual cases are more complex. Being a full-time carer for a family member is an immensely difficult and often thankless task, but crises always seem to occur at Christmas and all too often lead to an unnecessary hospital admission. This is exactly what happened to one of my elderly patients one Christmas Eve. I was covering the afternoon session at a small surgery where I didn’t know the patients. It was nearly 6 p.m. and I was looking forward to getting home to start celebrating Christmas with my family.

The phone rang as I was just seeing my last patient of the day. A distraught daughter was crying down the phone: ‘It’s my father. We can’t cope any more. He’s got Alzheimer’s and he’s getting frailer. My mother had a stroke two years ago and can barely look after herself. We need some help.’

‘It’s 6 p.m. on Christmas Eve,’ I unhelpfully pointed out.

‘I know!’ wailed the daughter. ‘I’ve got my own family to look after and my sister is away skiing. Dad gets confused during the night and wanders around the house. He just needs someone to sit with him overnight. Someone to make sure he doesn’t fall. My mother can’t be expected to do it, she’s too frail. I’ve got my daughter and her young family staying at ours so I can’t do it myself. If you can’t arrange something, he’ll have to go into hospital.’

I hate these situations. I was being made to feel responsible for this person’s difficult situation. It wasn’t fair to admit him to hospital when he wasn’t actually unwell; however, I could see the daughter’s viewpoint. She had her own family to look after and didn’t want to spend Christmas Eve chasing her confused father around his house. What I couldn’t understand is why this always seems to happen just before the holidays start. Couldn’t something have been organised weeks ago?

This was a social problem rather than a medical one. Other than take him back to my house and have him spend Christmas with me, I didn’t really know what I could do. I ‘Googled’ the telephone number for the local emergency social services and gave it to the daughter. I told her that they might be able to organise some sort of emergency care overnight. Her dad didn’t need a qualified nurse, just a caring person to sit with him and guide him back to bed when he got up and started wandering. There were enough carers in this town who would probably appreciate the money and plenty who weren’t Christian and would happily work on Christmas Eve.

Half an hour later I phoned the daughter back to see how she had got on. She told me that she had dialled the number I had given her but no one had answered.