Care for the elderly.

Much tutting and hand-wringing over a report that one in five hospitals are failing to provide the level of care required by law for elderly patients.  I have some personal experience of this relating to an elderly relative who had a few stays in hospital in her waning years and had some bad experiences which could only be put down to a lack of proper care and attention.  It seemed to me that the main problem was that the hospital was not prepared to accept that geriatric nursing is a specialist skill which requires a certain sort of person. What appears to happen is that a turn on the geriatric ward is seen as part and parcel of everyday nursing, with the result that you get people on there who simply are not psychologically or temperamentally suited to the job. I couldn't help but compare the far superior care and attention she got at the nursing home where she lived - the difference being of course that the staff there were recruited specifically for that sort of work.  Anyway, that's my penn'orth, for what it's worth.