Anne's Law: proposals for adults living in care homes to maintain family and friendship connections 

Around 70% of residents living in care homes have a dementia diagnosis. Connecting with people who know who they are and who are able to access their feelings and feel loved is fundamental to wellbeing. So much has already been lost- home, independence, lifestyle. Being cared for without contact with our loved ones is existing, not living. Access to a family life is already a human right. Care staff, however kind and willing they are, cannot replace the people we love and often have very little time or capacity to meet emotional needs for comfort and attachment. Quality of life needs to be be held at the same level of importance as quantity.

Putting equal emphasis and importance on mental health and wellbeing as physical health and wellbeing and ensuring individuals human rights to a family are sustained.

A relationship is between 2 people. For someone living with dementia, they may not be able to name their children, but when they are together they feel the connection and may be able to remember, so relying purely on the resident may mean that meaningful relationships that the resident is not able to describe, would be missed. Saying the long goodbye for someone living with dementia is very difficult for families too, so there are needs for both the resident and their family. If the person has full capacity, then the resident could choose.

The model of institutional, communal care is a challenging, unnatural and archaic one often based around low staffing levels. There does need to be a complete rethink of adult care. Supporting people to remain at home or being in small 'cottage' models where care and support bubbles would be more containable.

There were also many aspects in the pandemic that flew in the face of good infection control, such as agency workers going from one care home to the next but the perception that if a daughter visited they posed too big a risk. Or people being discharged from hospital without rehab or tests, creating intolerable risk and impact. The rights of residents in my view was lower down on the list than hospital beds or care home reputation. A human inclusive approach, weighing up the risk v benefit and including wishes and wellbeing has to be the way forward.

Retaining meaningful relationships is fundamentally important. The emotional benefits of spending time with people we love and who love us is the most important part of life.

The all or nothing of entering care needs to shift. It is not and should not be on a par with a prison. Supporting families to take on some of the care or have periods where they support the person to stay with them, should be normal. The barriers are often down to money-e.g. they are receiving funding for the care home so can't get care support to go and stay with their family for a few weeks Families are also at times perceived as a threat by care staff, because they may hold staff to account or challenge practices.
As said before risks and benefits need to be cognisant of mental as well as physical wellbeing and there needs to be transparency around quality and quantity which may be difficult.

Difficult to implement in the current model of care and artificial boundaries between home, residential and nursing care. Until there is support for people to age in place what ever their needs, there is the risk that it will just be too difficult to achieve.

It should certainly apply to residential and nursing homes but it should equally apply to people living alone at home.