The Care Commission publishes the standards that must be satisfied for a care home to continue to be registered. The complete document is about 70 pages long, is entitled National Care Standards Care homes for older people.
Despite having been built in the 1970s St Drostan's possesses all the facilities and properties required by the current standards, and satisfies many of the recommendations based on more recent thinking about the requirements for the residential accommodation of old people.
Fire precautions are particularly important in a home like St Drostan's from which frail old people, and confused old people may need to be evacuated rapidly. St Drostan's is a single-storey home, avoiding the need to evacuate residents from upper storeys. The corridors are wide enough to allow wheelchairs to pass freely and satisfy the width-requirements specified by the standards.
Footnote 6, p. 20, of the National Care Standards, Care homes for older people, referred to above states:
Providers are recommended to move as near as possible to 840 mm clear opening width off corridors of at least 1200 mm, and for narrower corridors, door widths need to be wider.
Note: The footnote recommends the clear opening width, it does not require the minimum and indeed recognizes that some premises cannot satisfy the recommendation.
The clear opening width of the doors in St Drostan's is 820 mm, 20 mm (4/5") narrower than the recommended width, a mere 2% smaller than the recommended width. Notice the relationship between door-opening width and corridor width. If the corridors are narrower, the doors need to be correspondingly wider. From the point of view of manoeuvering a wheelchair, the same effect is produced by providing wider corridors if the doors are narrow. The corridors of St Drostan's are 1400 mm wide, about 12% wider than the minimum recommended by the Care Commission. In any case, a competent joiner could plane 10 mm off each door jamb, and refit doors to satisfy this recommendation for the clear opening width of the doors.
A single room in an existing home is required to have a minimum floor area of 10.25 square metres. The single rooms at St Drostan's exceed the minimum.
Much has been made by representatives of Aberdeenshire Council about
the lack of en-suite facilities at St Drostan's, and about the
insuperable difficulties of providing them. Provision 13, p. 20 of the
Care Standards states:
If the provider wants to install en-suite facilities (which may only be a toilet and wash-hand basin) these must be 3.5 square metres or more.
However, footnote 5 on the same page states
To ensure flexibility for existing en-suite provision which is otherwise of good quality, some specific criteria may be agreed with the Commission registration and inspection staff to allow existing en-suite facilities which do not meet this standard to remain in use.
The issue of en-suite facilities has been discussed ignoring one fundamental fact. It can never have been the intention of the Care Commision to impose en-suite facilites on those people who do not want them, or on those who are too frail, or too confused to use them without assistance or supervision. Many of the residents of St Drostan's need help to attend to personal hygiene and bodily functions. For such people, en-suite facilities can present an additional and avoidable physical hazard. To close St Drostan's because it cannot provide en-suite facilities, whether they are needed or not is nothing more than a convenient pretext. Aberdeenshire Council has given no evidence that it has sought the advice of the Care Commission on this matter.
Aberdeenshire Council has stated that St Drostan's needs to be completely rewired. The expected life of PVC insulation of the type standard in the 1970s is about 50 years, taking us to 2024. The wiring was designed to support electrical underfloor heating, and there has been no significant increase in the demand for power since the 1970s, so why should the electrical system need to be replaced? It is true that the time-lag in the response of under-floor heating was not anticipated when it was installed, and some supplementary electric heating may sometimes be necessary, but does this really require a complete rewiring? Aberdeenshire Council has the information, but keeps it to itself.
Is the reason for rewiring the anticipated use of halogen-free or fire-resistant cables? The regulations for wiring using the newer cables are currently under review. It is expected that over a timescale of 1-2 years the recommendations to rewire using the new, safer, cables will become statutory requirements. So all of Aberdeenshire's care homes will probably need to be rewired. It is far more complicated and expensive to rewire multistorey buildings than single storey ones, so the expense of replacing the wiring at St Drostan's would be proportionately less than elsewhere, undermining Aberdeenshire's claim that the cost of rewiring St Drostan's is prohibitively expensive.
There is no doubt that a cabal involving the officers of Aberdeenshire Council, and probably the chairs of some committees, including the Social Work and Housing Committee are determined to close St Drostan's. They have given no evidence at all of seeking alternatives to the closure of St Drostan's: opposition seems to have strengthened their resolve. How dare the public seek to influence the decisions of their betters? Councillors, in general, are in the dark. Some seem unaware not that the matter is out of their hands, but that the matter has never been in their hands, kept out of their hands, by doubtfully legitimate means, circumventing any involvement from most of the people's elected representatives.
No reasonable person expects that Aberdeenshire Council's provision for any group will satisfy all of the group's requirements. It is possible, with careful investigation, to find out not just what people want, but of the things that they want, which are the most important.
For the residents of St Drostan's, for the friends and relatives of the residents of St Drostan's, for the staff of St Drostan's, at least most of them, what they want most of all is not shiny new en-suite facilities for everybody whether they want them or not, whether they can use them or not, it is the survival of their home. Aberdeenshire Council is set on closing it down, shifting the residents, like so many cows and sheep, to other pens, away from family, away from friends, to strange distant homes, and some of them will die as a result. Still, it will save a fraction of a penny on the Council Tax so it's worth it in the end.