Thanks Sunshine, "people who have stopped work to look after a parent are going to be put deeper into poverty depending on the particular services in the area they live" Yup and no doubt many of these people will become victims to the benefit scrounger attacks. We have governments determined to try achieving healthcare on as cheap an initial cost as possible. I say initial cost as over the longer term I believe it would have been more economic to have properly invested in care services.
For me to see myself just how hard things were for my friend in Berlin as she cared for her father and the impact her caring was having on her was to be honest frightening. Many of the people finding themselves having to give up working to look after their elderly, and sometimes not so elderly, family are not entirely youngsters themselves with many in their 50's/60's having their own health problems. There will be those family carers who without hesitation or complaint put their own health issues to the back of their mind and do all they can to care for their family. Unfortunately we appear to have governments which are all too happy to know this and take for granted that families will not simply abandon their family to a care home the moment things get hard.
The love of family is a strong tool which I feel governments are not slow to exploit to the umpteenth degree, sadly this exploitation is short sighted as these family carers will themselves be hastened into poorer mental health through the stresses associated with caring for elderly parents. It is very hard to see the mum or dad whom you grew up with deteriorate from the confident big guy, (as my Dad was to me as a kid) or great Mum my mother was as she did everything she could to look after and bring my brothers and sisters along with me, to a shadow of themselves through such as cancer or dementia appearing as helpless as new born babies. My last remark being in relation to the way my friend in Berlin eventually ended up having to change he Dad's nappies every day and not just once. It is things like this that many I feel have no idea of ahead of themselves, there is many a time I've heard of sex education in schools being talked about, how about some teaching in schools about the unseen effects of dementia, those that thousands of family carers are faced with everyday?