Abused of the Sick and Elderly People in Care: The Role of English Language

There has been a lot of publicity regarding the abuse of the sick and elderly people in care by their carers. The most recent abuse case involves the CCTV footage of carers beating their clients. This practice is not acceptable not only to the victims’ relatives but also to everyone that cares about the vulnerable ones in society.

The government adviser on Health, Dr Shereen Hussein, has now come up with a radical proposal to stop this abuse of the sick and elderly people in care. Her proposal is that “recruitment agencies should ensure care workers can speak English before placing them in vulnerable people's homes”. In other words, people who are not highly proficient in English language should not look after the less abled.

There is no denying the fact that communication is very important between clients and their carers within the care industry. Clients communicate their needs such as what to eat or wear to careers in English Language. The carers must understand this language for these needs to be met. It is assumed that the inability of carers to understand their clients language can frustrate the carers and result in the abuse of the clients. If this is true all the carers convicted for abusing their clients in the UK will be none native English speakers.

Evidence however does not support this link between poor English Language skills and client abuse. Rita Page and Lynette Crook, both native English speakers, were jailed for seven months for physically and verbally abusing a man who had been paralyzed following a road accident. William Bowman, Chevonne Benson, and Claire Strong, all native English speakers, were convicted for abusing their dementia clients. Amanda Alesbrook also a native English speaker was jailed for stealing money from her client. Akousa Sakyiwa, a Sierra Leonean, was jailed for her ill-treatments of female patients in the Geriatric ward. Jonathan Aquino, a Filipino, was convicted for assaulting his client. These cases suggest that any person can abuse his or her client regardless of whether the carer is a native English speaker or born abroad.

If there is no strong relationship between poor English skills and carers abuse of clients, where did the Government Health adviser get her information that the inability to understand English language is a major risk factor for client abuse? The simple explanation is that none native English speakers tend to be blamed for most of the ills affecting the health sector. In addition to non-native English carers, foreign doctors who did not do their medical studies here in Britain have also been blamed for a lot of failings within the NHS. There is now a proposal to raise the bar for foreigners who intend to practice here as doctors. This undermines the fact that the doctor who has committed the most horrendous atrocities in British history was British – Harold Shipman who murdered 15 of his patients one after another.

It is too simplistic to attribute most of the abuse of the sick and elderly in care to none native English speaking carers. The cases above illustrate that any carer can perpetuate client abuse regardless of his or her English language skills. Instead of attributing blames to one group of carers, a wide range of areas should be explored to establish how to eradicate or at least minimize this problem of client abuse. This can include subjecting all potential carers to tests such as sympathy test to determine how the applicants can react if faced with certain challenging situations including swearing by a client. Let us not give a dog a bad name and hang it.