LAST week’s feature "Care sector facing a ‘storm of challenges’", February 4, certainly highlights the complex issue surrounding the care of the elderly in residential homes.

But there is another important aspect to all of this: in the fact that many elderly people try to hold on to their own independence for as long as possible and the last resort would ever be going into a home.

Many such people look to their precious life savings or the value of their home, which they have worked all their life for, to be passed on to children or family.

Sadly, sometimes an accident or a health problem like a stroke necessitates the move to a care home and the issue is taken out of the person’s hands.

Home help care and community groups are crucial to the elderly and assist in respecting the individual’s wishes in order for a person to remain in the familiar surroundings of their own home and everything should be done to provide this before the decision is made that necessitates residential care.

Whereas one sympathises with the closure of care homes, ultimately at the end of the day they are businesses and the ones that have closed are because they are no longer ‘commercially viable’.

Rev Chris Colledge

Durley Gardens, Bournemouth