Aged care advertising scares me. Like much else about aged care services in Australia, some advertisements stereotype residents. At least, that’s one conclusion I came to when a series of ads appeared in the newspaper my husband buys.
‘Our village must mobilise to support the well being of elders,’ read a recent headline in the West Australian Newspaper. The headline twists the African proverb, ‘It takes a village to raise a child’.
Karen Hitchcock’s essay Dear Life: On Caring for the Elderly is compassionate, respectful and beautifully written. As a study of ageism in our society, it is also seriously scary.
The author is a physician who works in a major Melbourne hospital. Her patients are mostly elderly. She has a Doctor of Philosophy Degree in Writing and is the author of award-winning fiction.
Dear Life
Root canal treatment has taken up most of my spare thinking time in the last couple of weeks, When I wasn’t worrying about my tooth, I had a wonderful time at the Fringe World, Arts and Writing Festivals in Perth.
