I have come close to some so-called care homes in the recent past and I didn’t like what I saw, writes Alan Watkins. A family member was admitted with dementia. How he was looked after – if that is the right phrase – was shocking.

The staff really did care for him but they seemed to lack the training and the time to provide the care he needed.

On several occasions we visited to find food left within easy reach, water left out of reach.
Fine if you can move, if you can reach the drink, but he no longer had the ability to move.
As for feeding himself – it would be laughable if it wasn’t so tragic.

The staff didn’t remove what was no longer needed, nor have the nous to realise he was unable to feed himself.
Until the last days of his illness, when a physiotherapist suggested he needed to be got out of bed, his only company were family members, or fleeting staff visits.

They were not briefed on the need to get him out of bed.
We live four hours away but whenever we could we would join the rest of the family. We did that the weekend before last.

I got a little wave from him as we said “bye for now”. It was the first real sign he knew.

We came home on the Monday. Less than 48 hours later we received a call from his wife. She had just returned from visiting him.

That morning the staff turned him to ease his bed sores. There was a sigh from him, and he slipped away.

Was it wrong to wish him dead? I don’t think so.

For the past year, he had lived with cancer, dementia and bed sores. He had no life. He woke in pain, he lived with pain, he slept through pain.

At least he could sleep. He didn’t know where he was. Months ago he lost the ability to speak.
He went with great dignity. And he went with a firm belief based on his faith that he knew where he was heading.

Dementia, we learned the day before his death, is now the biggest killer in this country.
A terrifically fit man reduced to a six-stone weakling in months during his stay in a home that cost thousands of pounds a month for his care.

God help any of us who will have to go through what he went through.
Yet this is a good care home. That’s official.
You could have fooled me.