Can we talk about ageing populations?

[Kendodd]

Birth rates around the world are collapsing. South Korea has the lowest birth rate at about 0.7. That means for every 100 people, 35 children will be born. There are predicted to be more people over 65 than under very soon. Many countries are predicted to see their populations half be 2100. While I think this is great for the planet and wouldn't want to change things, it will present problems.

What to do?

There's already a crisis of recruitment in care. Throwing more money at it won't work, we need people to do other jobs as well. Limiting care/health care to the elderly, I can't see how that would work either. Also, most of these countries are democracies, the elderly would be the most powerful voting block.

Anyone any ideas?

Honestly, it shows how naive and idiotic people are to believe that people of a certain age or disability shouldn't be treated. Shall we talk about women's rights and what a shambles that now is? Before you know it, rights are infringed. No-one has the right to withhold treatment.

I've said it before - I've never understood the vitriol directed at people with 3+ children. They are essentially outliers.

For all people go on about the environmental impact of large families, it turns out that if you educate women and give them other options, very few women want more than 2 children and a sizeable (and increasing) proportion want no children at all. So maybe stopping demonising families of 4+ children would be a start.

In reality though, I don't see how you increase the birth rate significantly except through forced procreation and dialling back on women's contraceptive and reproductive rights. A scary thought, when you look at the pronatalist policies increasingly in vogue in places like China.

So, it’s 2031, and the assisted dying bill has been in place for a while. Kylie has multiple health issues and is so tired.

But on the plus side, she’s a widow with a house worth 2 million on the open market.

Her son and daughter in law come to see her once in a blue moon. It’s sad that they’re in rented housing without enough bedrooms for the kids the government is encouraging them to have.

If only there was something that Kylie could do to help them. 🤔 They wouldn’t dream of suggesting, never mind repeatedly, that grandma Kylie ought to take herself off to Switzerland for a nice, long, holiday, would they?

Assisted dying is a symptom of poor care, and poor funding of care by the government. If those elderly people who were unable to recognise their loved ones, unable to speak or hear, bedbound, incontinent etc had the right kind of care we wouldn't need to be killing them off just to be kind. Society doesn't care. Once we hit 75 we become invisible at best, but often viewed as a burden.

There isn’t a right kind of care for those people. Particularly those who would have been absolutely horrified at the prospect of being like that. The right kind of care for me if I ended up like that would be a syringe of morphine.

The poster you quoted isn't talking about people like your family member who is volunteering in their nineties.

They are instead talking about people like my family member, almost 90, who has had Alzheimers for 10 years, has been in the late stages of the disease for about 2 years now - is constantly confused, distressed and agitated, can do nothing for himself, has to be hoisted from bed to chair - an action which takes at least two trained people to accomplish and he attempts to hit and bite them when it's happening because he is scared and doesn't know or understand what is happening. He has no idea of where he is, or who we are. He is doubly incontinent, struggles to eat or understand what food is, and on the very rare occasions that he actually speaks, he says, "Please help me!".

But if he coughs, he gets antibiotics!

There is a very good reason for pneumonia being called the "old man's friend", but now we insist on treating everything and prolonging the agony, distress and indignity of what is actually a slow death.

I don't disagree with the analogy, but we also put animals down because of costs, because we have nowhere to put them, and because they are unwanted or considered undesirable.

I'm also disabled and working. I understand that migraine diabetes and asthma can be serious and disabling. I'm tbh looking more at people like myself with less socially acceptable conditions and deformities, in a wheelchair with three major disabilities and needing a carer, machinery and medication to get me into a state where I have independence and can work every day. Someone doesn't put in those first two hours, then I'm bed bound. I am also in a lot of pain, and unable to sleep.
I am refused pain killers - in hospital I'm automatically put straight onto morphine to give an idea of levels of pain.
I am (normally) refused sleeping tablets (currently allowed for 14 days only following return from hospital) In hospital I am allowed them as it's recognised sleep deprivation lowers quality of life.
I am also refused a hospital prescribed medication to prevent the liklihood of Hepatitis B returning as my immune system has had to be removed. GP's surgery is arguing about the cost.

Already there are quite a few push factors towards living a lower quality of life than is necessary. Protecting budgets, keeping opiates out of the community, keeping addiction figures lower.
My GP has already described my quality of life as poor regardless of my opinion on what my quality of life is..

I disagree with not treating elderly people that otherwise have a good quality of life, but think we should treat the elderly with as much medical intervention as we can if they have a good quality of life.

Please don’t think like that…quality of life should be decided first and foremost by the person living that life. It is not selfish of you to want to live, it’s part of being human that most people will fight to stay alive no matter their belief systems.I’m an ex hospice health professional and I believe equally that people should receive top quality palliative care whilst also supporting other peoples choice to end their life at a time of their choosing . It is inevitable that assisted dying will be introduced in the UK in the future however there are huge risks of introducing it at a time when the nhs is in such an abysmal state ,some people may go down that route purely because of a lack of good care. Some people received shockingly callous treatment during Covid so I’m sorry for what you went through.

@fourelementary I totally agree and I am 68, I have no wish to be doubly incontinent and not know what day it is. I have told all my loved ones I do not want to resuscitated if I will have no quality of life and believe that we should have assisted dying in the UK so that people do not have to travel to Dignitas earlier than necessary.

this is unhelpful false equivalency. supporting someone with diabetes or a learning difference to live a healthy / meaningful life is a very different process to drawing out the dying process of an 85 year old who has lived a meaningful life but can no longer care for themselves.

Oh ffs!

There is no "right kind of care" for people whose illness means they are, as you yourself say, "unable to recognise their loved ones, unable to speak or hear, bedbound, incontinent etc." They could be tended round the clock by the most caring, gentle, experienced, compassionate people, and they would still be agitated, distressed and confused, with neither dignity nor hope for any improvement in their condition.

Edited to add: the only other way they can be, if not actively confused and distressed, is to be essentially a breathing corpse - lying motionless in bed apart from their chest moving slightly as they breathe. Why would anyone see that as better than death?

@Bagpussrules well said, totally agree!!

We don't have the resources or the manpower to provide the right kind of care for people who are that dependent, the right kind of care would require one-on-one 24/7. Very few people want to work in elder care as it is and the wages are rubbish.

I'm not saying elderly people don't deserve a good quality of life, I'm saying we don't have the resources to provide it due to increasing numbers of elderly people and decreasing numbers of younger people to do the actual work.

I guess families will need to step up more to provide care if there are not enough carers to go around. Those that don't have family will need to be priority for paid carers.

The housing supply problems that you describe could be resolved through Land Value Tax.

Kylie could assist her children by downsizing to an easier-to-manage flat and gift some of the proceeds from her house sale to her children.

People have suggested safeguards against filial coercion upthread, such as declarations having to be made years in advance with the involvement of legal and medical professionals. Kylie also has the option of leaving everything to Battersea Dogs or Women's Aid and making sure her "D"C know what her will says.

I totally agree!

Family member of mine has advanced vascular dementia and is being treated for kidney failure!. Prolonging a life that she spends in bed, doubly incontinent, can't communicate, barely eating. She would never ever have agreed to any of this if she could have predicted it. It's cruel.

As I said, the elderly dog test. We don't put down elderly dogs that still have good days left. We put down the ones for whom the good days are over and they only have bad days ahead.

Actually, they do. A doctor can say "I quit" and stop treating patients at any time.

Such bollocks here. No one has the right to treatment. Treatment is provided in line with budget. No money, no treatment. You must be aware we could keep everyone 'alive' more or less for ever right? But we don't, because we can't afford it and it would not be in anyones best interest. So yes we already withdraw treatment all the time! How else do you think people ever die.
What people are suggesting is that we are less proactive in treatment and that people have the right to assisted suicide or similar. All good.

I'm nearly in my 50's so this is probably a non-realistic plan, but I'm hoping that, if I need care in old age, it can be provided by a robot, rather than some poorly paid carer who would rather be working in hospitality etc.
With the problems at A&E departments I have long thought that a separate queue for 80+ years would be sensible as they often have different needs to younger attendees.
My DM has dementia and, whilst it is a slow decline with her, I hope a swift illness will end her days rather than the long drawn out suffering some describe on here.

I too have a degenerative disease that will take me in the next ten years. But I agree with some of the posters. My family member is in their 80's with vascular dementia end stages now. She's just sleeping most of the time. She's crying and confused while awake. Doubly incontinent. Has bed sores as she's so thin even with meticulous care. She's refusing to eat much. She's starving to death in front of our eyes. Yet the doctors have decided to treat her for kidney failure!. Prolonging her natural death.

I don't think posters are wanting people like us to fuck off lol they just want our elderly to be given some bloody dignity and to allow them to die from old age naturally instead of dragging things on that don't benefit them at all.

Families do not have the time or the resources to provide care for elderly relatives, for numerous reasons such as, not living near to the elderly relative, having to work full-time, having children to provide and care for, not being healthy energetic or young enough themselves to provide the kind of care required.

Elderly people being cared for by relatives only works in traditional societies. In the situations women are subjugated and so it is easy to railroad them into doing it for free, plus there are fewer elderly people and those that there are do not reach the same degree of frailty and dependence that they do in modern societies.

It is unhelpful that disabled people ask this question, but many of us already know what starts as only being for x and y, will get expanded to z, and then to a +b. It wont be people with diabetes or LD's, it will be the profoundly disabled and the multiply disabled whose quality of life is already seen as sub par.
Disabled people also age, if we're lucky.

We are already facing a situation where the powers that be are saying there are too many people considered disabled, and too many considered economically inactive. GP's saying their budgets wont cover every medication a consultant prescribes for patients, LHA's closing down specialist clinics, and refusing equipment until need can be proved by damage already occurring rather than as preventative. Being pushed into enforced sedentary existence in care homes post hospital instead of rehab or step down nursing units to manipulate bed needs.

I'll get flamed for this but years ago when there was a lot more SAHM/ housewives they provided the care for elderly relatives. Unfortunately this isn't the case anymore and a lot of families can no longer afford to have just 1 income .