elderly – praag.org

Black nurse caught on camera, assaulting elderly white patient

A black nurse caught beating a white pensioner at an upmarket East London home for the frail was due to make her second appearance in court yesterday.

Assaults on Lily Kirchmann Complex resident Hope Shepherd, 84, on February 3 and again on February 23 were captured on a secret camera in a television set at the home.

A 15-minute-long spy camera footage allegedly show nursing staffer Ncediswa Mkenkcele punching Shepherd with her fists in the face.

Mkenkcele is said to also have bashed Shepherd against the head with a deodorant can.

She allegedly ends the assault by spraying deodorant into a breathing hole in Shepherd’s throat. The elderly woman has throat cancer.

Mkenkcele was arrested on March 23.

Police spokesman Captain Mluleki Mbi said the Duncan Village resident was charged with assault with intent to cause grievous bodily harm.

“She appeared in the East London Magistrate’s Court on March 24 and her case was postponed to May 5 for further investigation,” Mbi said.

Mkenkcele was not asked to plead and was released on warning.

Berea Gardens Retirement Foundation executive director Mike Schulze said there had been a meeting with the Shepherd family.

“We apologised unreservedly for the alleged assaults against her,” he said.

“The employee involved resigned immediately on being confronted.”

Robertson planted the camera on December 31 when her mother sustained an unexplained broken arm.

Days before she had noticed bruises and swollen marks on her mother’s body.

“There were not enough good reasons as to what happened to her from the staff, other than that she had fallen off the bed or bumped herself,” Robertson said.

In February, she noticed her mother had a blue eye.

She then viewed the footage on her camera and saw the assaults. She immediately notified complex management.

“It really has been a traumatic experience for me and my family. I saw my mother being beaten and pushed around,” Robertson said.

She had moved her mother from the home to a facility in Selborne, but her mother was confused and suffering from flashbacks, she said.

Clients pay as much as R14 000 a month for their loved ones to be cared for at Lily Kirchmann.

Schulze said in addition to the criminal charges, the foundation had met with all nursing staff at Lily Kirchmann to again stress the foundation’s zerotolerance policy on abuse.

Letters had also been sent to the residents’ families. – The East London Herald

Elderly die of starvation in Ukraine

Sixteen elderly people died from starvation in September in Donetsk. The people could not eat anything as they were afraid to go out of basements, where they were hiding from bombs, the head of Fair Aid Charity Fund, Doctor Elizaveta Glinka said.

“There are many elderly and lonely individuals, who experience terrible problems, living in cold apartments, basements and bomb shelters. The strong shortage of medicines and the lack of medical supervision require the creation of a hospice for those who need assistance. In September, 16 elderly people died from starvation in the center of the city of Donetsk. They were afraid to leave their shelters, so they could not make any food for themsevles,” she said on Tuesday at a meeting of the Human Rights Council under the President of the Russian Federation.

“We [the Russians] are the nation that survived the war and its terrible consequences. We shared bread even with prisoners of war. I believe that we can not ignore the weak in this situation – the elderly and people with disabilities. We decided to support the creation of the hospice in Donetsk,” she said, RIA Novosti reports.

Elizaveta Glinka, known as Dr. Liza, has repeatedly visited the south-east of Ukraine with humanitarian missions to deliver medicines and medical instruments, as well as to evacuate sick children from the combat zone. In early August, Glinka brought nine seriously ill children from the east of Ukraine to Moscow. Later, she returned from Donetsk with three more children.

Source: Pravda

Japan’s shoplifting grannies

The number of elderly people caught shoplifting in Japan’s capital city has outstripped that of teenagers for the first time since records began, a report said Monday.

A quarter of the people arrested on suspicion of the crime in Tokyo last year were at least 65 years old, figures showed, amid warnings of increasing isolation in the age group.

“Even though the total number of arrests for shoplifting has been declining, the ratio of elderly people are on the rise,” a Tokyo Metropolitan Police spokesman said.

“Our survey shows that elderly shoplifters tend to be lonely, having no one to talk to, and having no hobby to enjoy,” he said.

Statistics showed 3,321 people aged 65 or older were arrested for shoplifting, accounting for 24.5 percent of the total, while those aged 19 or younger made up 23.6 percent, with 3,195 individual arrests. Both figures are slightly down in absolute terms from 2011, the spokesman said.

It was the first time since comparable data had been collected that the elderly made up a higher proportion of suspected thieves, the Mainichi Shimbun newspaper reported.

Around a quarter of Japan’s 128 million population is aged 65 or older, and the country has a far-below replacement birthrate of an average 1.39 children for every woman.

There are regular reports of bodies lying unfound for weeks or even months after a single, elderly person has died alone. Commentators say the phenomenon is a result of the fraying of familial ties as Japan has modernised.

A government survey last week found 3.5 million elderly women and 1.4 million elderly men live alone. – AFP

Care centres to protect elderly from rape

Adult daycare centres are being introduced in KwaZulu-Natal to protect grandmothers from rape.

The provincial social development department resolved to construct the centres following a spate of attacks on elderly women.

Social development MEC Weziwe Thusi said yesterday that the first centre will be in KwaSwayimane, in the Midlands, the village where two grannies were raped a week apart. Thusi yesterday said at least R7-million has been set aside for the KwaSwayimane centre.

A 94-year-old great-grandmother was raped in the village in August. A week later, an 84-year-old grandmother was raped in the same village. In the same month, a 74-year-old woman was raped, stabbed and robbed in her granny flat in Bisley, in Pietermaritzburg.

Last month, a 70-year-old woman was raped in her home in front of her grandchildren at Matsheketsheni Reserve, in Sundumbili on the north coast.

At the court appearance of a 26-year-old man, accused of raping the 94-year-old, frigthened the elderly.

“It will operate like creches. People will leave their grannies on the way to work and pick them up in the afternoon,” she said.

The centre will have a daycare facility for young children.

Head of department Bheki Nkosi said drugs played a role in the abuse of elderly women in the area.

“We have knowledge of the kinds of drugs that make young people high and they commit such crimes. We want to push a campaign of anti-drugs and substance abuse vigorously because it’s one of the contributors to the rapes,” he said.

Thusi conceded that old age homes were not popular in some communities.

White oldie population explosion

A major study published by the United Nations has warned that the growing numbers of white and Asian elderly people presented significant challenges to welfare, pension and health care systems in both developing and developed nations.

And it bemoans the fact that skills and knowledge that older people have acquired are going to waste in societies rather than being used to their full.

Ageism is an infinitely more serious problem in Britain today than racism, sexism, fattism, homophobia, islamophobia and all the other imaginary nonsense the pc cadres drivel on about, says oldies.

The UN rightly says that what the older person has in the way of knowledge and experience is criminally wasted and/or ignored.

As a society, we are obsessed with IQ. But wisdom is far more important, they say. The consequences are obvious to those over 50, but rarely to younger observers

Richard Blewitt, chief executive of HelpAge International, which collaborated on the report, Ageing in the 21st Century says: “We must fully recognise that the vast majority of people will live into old age,” he added. “By revolutionising our approach and investing in people as they age we can build stronger, wealthier societies.”

Calling the ageing demographic a “megatrend that is transforming economies and societies around the world”, the report estimated that one in nine people of the world’s population of seven million are over 60.

The size of the elderly population is expected to swell by 200 million within 10 years past the one billion mark and soar to two billion by 2050, it forecast.

The number of centenarians in the world is projected to increase from fewer than 316,600 in 2011 to 3.2 million in 2050.

In Britain there are projected to be half a million centenarians by 2066, with one third of babies born in 2012 expected to celebrate their 100th birthday, according to Government statistics cited.

“The expected growth of the population of older persons should not be an excuse not to act but rather seen as a call to action. A well supported old age is in the interest of all generations,” said the 192-page report, which was released in Tokyo, to coincide with International Older Persons Day.

Japan is the only country with an older population of more than 30 per cent, but by 2050, 64 countries are expected to achieve that proportion including Britain.

The report warned that the skills and knowledge that older people have acquired are going to waste, with many of them underemployed, underactive and more likely to become a drain on a nation’s resources. Britain is among several European countries that have passed laws against employers discriminating against the elderly but progress has been uneven, said Mr Blewitt.

However successive British governments, like many others, tend to indulge in hand-wringing about the cost of caring for the elderly, he said, rather than exploiting what they had to offer.

Many have skills that would be immensely useful to the voluntary sector but have hardly been tapped on a mass scale. The report calls such opportunities the “longevity dividend”.

“Rather than burying our head in the sand and saying old people are going to ruin our economy, we have to see the opportunity in this,” said Mr Blewitt.

Ageing, said the report, “is a triumph of development”.

“Increasing longevity is one of humanity’s greatest achievements. People live longer because of improved nutrition, sanitation, medical advances, health care, education and economic well-being,” it continued.

But it warned that the most serious impact of ageing populations would be in developing countries without safety nets or adequate legal protection in place for older people.

In nations now dominated by young workers, urban migration has eroded traditional care of the elderly in extended families, as young parents have left for the cities. The trend has also tended to leave the elderly acting as primary carers of their grandchildren. In rural China, the study estimated that there are 52 million grandchildren looked after by their grandparents.

China was praised by the report for introducing a national pension of £5 a month, but for every developing country that does have some kind of similar scheme, there are nine that do not.

The report expressed concern “about the multiple discrimination experienced by older persons, particularly older women, including access to jobs and health care, subjection to abuse, denial of the right to own and inherit property and lack of basic minimum income and social security”.