Why do nurses quit? Because they care

Sometimes, on Sundays, I visit Richard, a friend who’s 95 and lives alone. The idea originally was that I’d be doing Richard a favour, but the truth is he cheers me up far more than I do him.

I visit because I like him, but as the weeks go by, I’m afraid I’ve also developed a grim curiosity about what it’s like to be in your nineties. Meals-on-wheels, crumbling knees, hernias, cannulas, the way a day dissolves into unintended naps… ‘Can’t we talk about something more cheerful?’ says Richard, as we sit knee to knee. But I’m obsessed, like a tourist taking notes on some awful country they must one day go to.

The notion I struggle most with is that Richard, though partially sighted and mostly immobile, is one of the very luckiest of old people. He’s made it to nearly 100 in decent nick: not blown up, run over or demented. He’s looked after, not in some woebegone home but in his own flat, and isn’t that the great ideal? Expert after expert, government after government, stresses the vital importance of keeping the elderly in their houses. It spares hospitals, saves money and more importantly it allows them — us — some dignity in our dotage, so they say.

So they say… but feeling dignified depends on being treated with dignity. And of all the terrible, riveting details about nonagenarian life, it’s Richard’s experience of care, courtesy of the NHS, that scares me most. Richard is looked after by district nurses, whom I’d always imagined to be old-school paragons: pleasant, dependable and skilled. ‘Well, they did used to be like that a decade ago,’ says Richard. Not any more. The longer I visit Richard the more I worry that there’s been a collapse in the quality of the nursing that goes on unseen in people’s homes.