Did anyone see Heat or eat on TV last night? Quite scary to think this faces us all in old age one day. Are things any better in France? Is there any Social Care provided? For anyone that did not see the programme, elderly people living on there own and in ill health, are just left to rot. Even those with a partner find it hard to cope alone and the local councils do not have the finances to provide the support that they are supposed to get.

Elderly care is becoming an increasingly big issue, as there are too few facilities everywhere, and France is no better and no worse than the UK in that respect.

Belgium seems to have better facilities for the elderly, and many French who live close to the Belgian border try to become resident in old people's homes in Belgium... but those homes are now overrun with French residents.

For those of you who read French papers and magazines, listen to French radio and watch French TV, there are regular programmes addressing the issue of senior care in France. Today for instance on the news, there was a feature about mistreating the elderly, within the family or in care homes, both fairly frequent occurrences. There is a French charity organisation called Alma France, set up in 1994, which campaigns against the worst abuses.
http://www.alma-france.org/

We are looking for "a bed to come up" (there doesn't seem to be a nice way to say this) for my mother in law here in Normandy. She has a pension of just under 650 Euros a month and a home costs just over 1700 Euros. She can still get rent allowance of about 50 Euros and "allocation personalisé d'autonomie " which she was entitled to before for the home help etc about 420 Euros. She can then get "aide sociale " but there will still be a hole of 500 Euros which will be paid by her children.

My mother in England is in a rest home and I don't have to pay a penny! And she gets free bus and 20% off fish and chips and bowling and the DIY shops and more...........

I've been here 17 yrs and don't want to retire here. There's a new law coming out : when you die or go into a home and your house is sold you will reimbourse the government the "allocation personalise d'autonomie"

It is the same in the UK, they force you to sell your home and use the money from it to pay for the homes the elderly person is resident in. It runs from £500.00 per week to £1,000.00 per week.

And worse, they force the residents to sit in a chair from morning to night after medicating them with heavy trtranquilizers. Often they are not fed or taken to the toilet. The old man in the TV show you speak of said the one he had been in was like a concentration camp.

Frankly what is happening the UK to the indigenous population is so dreadful now I don't know why we are not in the street burning sheep like the French do to protest.

I read in the Mail yesterday that the laws are changing to incorporate Sharia law. They suggest the DWP now pay benefits to men who have more than one wife, polygamists, for each wife and all the children from these so called marriages. The rest of the population would and does go to jail for bigamy if they are caught doing this. They are also considering the Islamic laws on women being introduced? I wonder where this will end. It seems one law for part of the population and another for the others.

It is scandalous, with the treatment of people here who have paid all their life for a welfare state, to introduce this for newcomers at a cost they claim they cannot afford, is a betrayal of the people.

The documentary you saw on Dispatches exposed how our elderly are being treated and it was so shocking I wept. But what we saw is not is not half of it.

That's absolutely right, Busby, I wonder how many British living in France know this fact.

And this is where there is a rather huge difference between France and the UK.

In France, the children are legally bound and forced to pay for the shortfall in their parents residential care fee.

My 82 year old Mother-in-Law came over at Christmas for a 2 week holiday. She has only just gone back to the uk....3 months later, after being taken ill whilst here.

On the 3rd day of her holiday she began to have trouble breathing so I took her to the hopital Girac, Angouleme. They were fantastic, as soon as we got there she was assessed and taken away. We then had to wait 4 hours for her to be stablized before we were allowed to see her. She went onto the ward (2 beds to a room) high-dependancy....at least 15 nurses running around everywhere, in and out of rooms. She wanted for nothing, was given the very best of care and after a week and a half she was allowed out. As she was dependent on oxygen they would not let me take her in the car but she had to come back by ambulance. We had already prepared a room for her and the ambulance driver carried her in and laid her down on the bed! He tucked her in and made sure she was connected up to all her meds and oxygen. After another week she began treatment to remove the phlem from her chest. The Doctor was fantastic, very professional and could not have treated her with more respect, unlike the treatment (or lack of it) she gets in the UK. She had 26 sessions with him which worked wonders. Her chest was clear for the first time in 15 years and she now has no inhalers (before this treatment she was on 2 different kinds 4 times a day).

She has suffered from chest problems all her life. We were told by the hospital Doctor that she had this particular infection for at least 8 weeks before she came to France. He was amazed and disgusted that it had gone that far without being treated. We were told by the Doctors at the hospital that if we had not brought her in when we did she would have died during the night! How scary is that!! She had actually been to her Doctors 3 times before her holiday here and was not even examined once! Before she came over we inquired about getting travel insurance for her but were told that as the condition was pre-existing they would not cover her. She came without any medical cover. Big mistake!

The bed cost £997.88 euros PER DAY + any meds, x-rays, exams etc. We phoned the Emergency HealthLine in the UK and they agreed to pay 80% of the costs which was a relief. However, we were still left with a bill of at least 200 euros per day. I also had to pay for all her medicines and doctors visits out of my own pocket; in all the bill was over 2500 euros (and that is just our bills....not the hospital bills aswell !!).

She is back in the UK now and has gone down hill extremely fast. We tried to keep her here but I guess she just wanted to be back in her own bed again. However, she is still oxygen dependent 27/7 for the rest of her life. This now means that she will never be able to come off it. When she got back to the UK her son rang her Doctor to arrange an assessment and was told that the Doctor was far too busy to come out to her and the appointment was made for 4 weeks later! What a joke! We now think that once the Doctor has assessed her that they will just put her into a home. She will be too much trouble for them. The treatment that the elderly get here in France is second to none. She is not even a French resident and she was treated extremely well. Most of all I felt that she was treated with respect, not as if she was a burden to the state.

Regards, Caroline.

Well the above tells you a lot,so-called free is not always the best, keep paying the mutual is the way.