Jubilee Court

Brian Dufton's concerns about how his wife will cope when 24-hour care is removed form Jubilee Court

Transcript

00:00I'm joined now by Brian Dufton and your wife Christine is in here and she suffers from dementia, I understand.

00:09You've moved in here in September in now small part due to the care service they offer here, is that correct?

00:16Yes, that's right.

00:16Do you want to tell us a little bit about what happened then, how you heard about what was happening?

00:21Well, about two weeks after we moved in, we started getting letters from Homes Plus and the council saying

00:27everything was going to be turned on its head and we knew nothing about it when we signed up for the lease at the beginning of September.

00:36And you say that the services here were the important part of your decision to move here.

00:43What are your fears going ahead of what's going to happen now?

00:48The problem is my wife has dementia and she's not getting any better and sooner or later care is going to be required.

00:57add to the fact that I'm not immortal, heaven knows what's going to happen.

01:02But that is the same for a lot of people.

01:05Yeah.

01:06So you say, and you haven't told your wife about this at the moment because...

01:11No, I haven't bothered to, that's the wrong word.

01:14I haven't involved her because I think it would upset her and achieve not very much.

01:19And when the care does end, how do you feel that will affect her?

01:25It's hard to say because at the moment she doesn't need it.

01:29She, if and when it goes, she won't miss it initially until something happens and then she does need it.

01:38Yeah.

01:39That's, you know, it's, it's, we moved here trying to future-proof a little bit ourselves and I'm not sure that it was a good move now.

01:49And they haven't given you, they're giving you an option to pay, pay extras to keep the care here.

01:54Has that been an option that's been...

01:55No, it hasn't been discussed yet because when we, before we signed up, I told the Michelle here that, yes, we wanted to care at some stage.

02:09And she said, yeah, that's fine.

02:10When you want it, let us know and we can organise things.

02:15But it's not got any further than that.

02:17We've been overtaken by events.

02:20Yeah.

02:20And would you have moved here had you, had you known this?

02:24I would have seriously thought twice about it.

02:28Half the reason we moved here is because it's a large flat.

02:31Where we were in Barleston, it was a small place and it was a one-bedroom flat and we were starting to have problems.

02:40The accommodation here, the flat, is absolutely fine.

02:44I've got no criticisms of that at all.

02:47But 50% of the reason for moving here was that there's care available on-site.

02:54So what do you think you'll do now?

02:57Not a lot we can do, really.

02:59We're almost between the devil and the deep blue sea.

03:03Brian Dufton, thank you very much.