Graham Grant.
5 min readMay 29, 2018

Picture of a war hero that shames our care system

By Graham Grant

LIKE many of his contemporaries, Malcolm Muirhead asked for relatively little from the state throughout his long life.

The former civil servant, remembered by his friends as ‘lovely’ and ‘intelligent’, served in the RAF in India during the Second World War.

And yet as a young man fighting for his country, he could never have foreseen the cruel indignities he would endure in his final days.

In this disturbing image, the 94-year-old lies in a hospital bed, emaciated – indeed near-skeletal – his face contorted in wordless agony.

For Mr Muirhead, this bed was in fact a salvation from the hell of a care home run by the City of Edinburgh Council.

He lost a stone-and-a-half in just a month while he languished at the Drumbrae home, which had been banned from taking more residents following a damning report by the Care Inspectorate.

It was only when social workers raised serious concern about Mr Muirhead, and he was moved to hospital, that he learned the doors of Drumbrae had been closed – though tragically too late to prevent his own ordeal.

The social work report noted his weight loss, described soberly as ‘significant’, and recorded that he was only being washed once a week – in a sink – having fallen from a chair in his shower area.

There were other observations of an apparent disregard for the pensioner’s basic wellbeing: he was wearing a ‘dirtied jumper’ with food stains on it, and had bloated feet, overgrown nails and infected toes.

Hamid Khosrowpour, a friend of Mr Muirhead, said that he only found out that Drumbrae was shut to new admissions after receiving details of the war veteran’s individual assessment.

Alarmed at its disclosures, he demanded that a GP should be called in, and on May 14 Mr Muirhead was admitted to the Western General Hospital in Edinburgh, where he died a week later.

Mr Khosrowpour said: ‘When I asked, they said Malcolm doesn’t show any interest in eating or drinking. He drank when I gave him juice and he said he was hungry.

‘On May 14, the doctor went in to see Malcolm. He sent him to hospital because he was badly dehydrated and needed fluid.

‘When he went into hospital the doctor said he couldn’t find a vein. He body was full of infection. In two days, they gave him seven bags of fluid and said still they couldn’t hydrate him.’

The Care Inspectorate report was published in March, following a visit to Drumbrae in December, and stipulated that the home should meet a legal requirement to ‘ensure that residents at risk of not eating or drinking enough receive sufficient help to reduce the risk of poor nutrition and dehydration’.

Its findings also ‘showed that some staff seemed to lack the knowledge and skills they needed to meet residents’ needs in a range of areas’.

The assessment noted that a requirement from a previous inspection to have dieticians monitor vulnerable service users’ weight ‘to identify any risk of significant weight loss, risk of malnutrition/and or dehydration’ had not been met.

And it identified errors being made with medicines, while pain being ‘poorly understood’ by workers, and rotas did not meet minimum staffing levels.

Speaking for the home, Judith Proctor, chief officer of the Edinburgh Health and Social Care partnership, said: ‘We take all inspection reports and feedback from service users and their families very seriously and investigate all complaints raised.

‘The partnership will continue to work with the Care Inspectorate and Drumbrae to improve their practice.’

Euphemisms abound in official jargon, but the notion of ‘improvement’, rather than a complete overhaul, is telling: as if all that is required is a slight modification of practice.

Nor is Drumbrae alone in providing substandard care: a Care Inspectorate report published last year showed one quarter of Scotland’s care homes had been rated unsatisfactory, weak or merely adequate by inspectors.

Above: Emaciated Malcolm Muirhead in hospital

It revealed that while 75.5 per cent received good, very good or excellent results, 24.5 per cent were rated unsatisfactory, weak or just adequate, and needed work to bring them up to standard.

There are many committed individuals working in care homes who are dedicated to looking after the elderly and vulnerable – but too many shocking cases have revealed that a minority of staff lack the requisite compassion.

Four years ago, care worker Sharon Young, was found guilty of abuse after she humiliated a severely disabled pensioner at Rosaburn House in East Kilbride, Lanarkshire.

In 2012, Janice Glover was convicted of a campaign of abuse against 81-year-old dementia sufferer William Thomson at Claremont Nursing Home in Ayr.

Meanwhile a report last month found an average of three residents in every Scottish care home have a healthcare-associated infection at any one time.

Health Protection Scotland (HPS) called for new measures to tackle urinary tract and skin infections, and respiratory infections such as colds, flu or pneumonia.

In recent years, the focus of elderly care has switched decisively towards keeping pensioners in their own homes.

The direction of travel was set out in 2011, when the Scottish Government and the council umbrella body Cosla published a blueprint for housing for the elderly, covering the following decade.

The plan stressed the ‘importance of supporting people to remain at home independently for as long as possible’.

A £70million ‘change fund’ was set up by ministers with the aim of bolstering the independence of older people – a process dubbed ‘shifting the balance of care’.

But a document published at the time to explain the strategy made clear that less would be spent on care homes to fund the move.

For Mr Muirhead, a childless widower, and many more with similar health problems, remaining at home was simply no longer an option.

And yet official statistics show our population is ageing, and the number of people aged 75 and over has rocketed by 31 per cent in the past two decades, while the number of those aged 65–74 has risen by 27 per cent.

The haunting image on this page of a man allowed to waste away by the state he fought to protect should act as a powerful reminder of the duty we owe to the many thousands who will depend on our help in generations to come.

*This column appeared in the Scottish Daily Mail.

Graham Grant.
Graham Grant.

Written by Graham Grant.

Home Affairs Editor, columnist, leader writer, Scottish Daily Mail. Twitter: @GrahamGGrant Columns on MailPlus https://www.mailplus.co.uk/authors/graham-grant

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