ELDERLY residents of Exeter care homes face having their mattresses repossessed.
An arrangement that saw Devon County Council and the NHS provide a free loan service of community equipment, such as beds, pressure care mattresses and hoists, to private sector residential and nursing homes, has been stopped.
Air pressure mattresses are used to help stop the bed-ridden from developing painful bedsores.
Care homes have been told they will be taken away in two weeks’ time. The mattresses can then be re-hired on a weekly or monthly basis – with the residents or his or her family picking up the bill.
On the open market an air-pressure mattress can cost as much as £2,000.
Among those set to lose his mattress is dementia-sufferer Geoffrey Southcott, 85, a former road worker and Exeter milkman, who has been a resident at the Dene Court Residential Home, in Butts Road, Heavitree for the past three years.
His son Mark said: “It really is awful that this should be happening and I don’t think people are aware of it. My brother Kevin went to visit our father and while at the home was handed a photocopied letter which said that Devon County Council would no longer be providing the air mattresses and they would have to be funded by the families. They have given us just two weeks notice before they come and collect them. It is incredibly short notice. People need these mattresses to stop bed sores, it’s a medical requirement and yet they are being taken away.
“What happens to those who cannot afford them? My dad’s savings are right down as it is. We are talking £500 a week.”
He added: “He has been there three years and we are very happy with the care he receives at Dene Court but they are caught in the middle of this.
“I understand that there are seven residents out of 24 at Dene Court who use air mattresses.”
A spokeswoman at Dene Court said: “It seems we will be able to hire them back on a weekly or monthly basis but that cost will have to fall on the residents and their families.
“They are medically required but of course we are a care home, not a nursing home. We have tried to get them on prescription but it is not possible.”
With all Devon care homes borrowing as much as £750,000 worth of care equipment at any one time from Devon Community Equipment Service – equipment that was often not being returned at the end of the loan period – the county say the level of expenditure was jeopardising the future of the service and could not be sustained.
A spokesman for the council, which jointly commissions the service with the NHS, said: “The problem is that homes were not honouring the temporary nature of the loans, and were often keeping the equipment to use with residents other than those it was issued to.”
“It’s meant that the service, which has a primary function to provide care equipment to people in their own homes, was effectively giving equipment away to care homes, when those homes should be making their own longer term arrangements to buy or hire the equipment they need for their residents.”