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	TX: 27.03.08 - Spinal Injuries PRESENTER: VICTORIA HOLLINGSWORTH

	Downloaded from www.bbc.co.uk/radio4 THE ATTACHED TRANSCRIPT WAS TYPED FROM A RECORDING AND NOT COPIED FROM AN ORIGINAL SCRIPT. BECAUSE OF THE RISK OF MISHEARING AND THE DIFFICULTY IN SOME CASES OF IDENTIFYING INDIVIDUAL SPEAKERS, THE 麻豆约拍 CANNOT VOUCH FOR ITS COMPLETE ACCURACY. HOLLINGSWORTH Three years ago I was involved in a serious car accident while filming in Spain for A Place in the Sun for Channel 4. I shattered my spine in three places as well as breaking five ribs and puncturing my lung. The doctors told my parents there was a good chance I'd be paralysed. ACTUALITY So it's Victoria Hollingsworth for an MRI scan. Take a seat. Thank you. Today I'm at the Wellington Hospital in London for a scan. After my accident I had nine hours of surgery and my broken vertebrae were replaced by metal rods and screws. I did learn to walk again and went back to presenting three months later although I still have regular check ups, which is why I'm here at the hospital today. ACTUALITY Hello good morning, my name's John [name], I'm one of the consultants working with Richard Villers and I come from Belfast. And Mr Villers been telling me a little bit about your hip and some of the problems that you've been having with it. Yeah it's still the same actually but hopefully the scan will illuminate. But for those that aren't as fortunate as me the future isn't so bright. After patients are discharged from hospital many can't go back to their homes because they aren't suitable for their needs. Instead they join a waiting list for suitable accommodation and since they can no longer stay in hospital they're housed elsewhere, often in unsuitable places. ACTUALITY [Someone singing 'Head, Shoulders, Knees and Toes'] Ricky Perrin lives in Brighton, he'd just become a dad before his accident but after it happened he spent a long time separated from his partner Sharon Banks and his sons River and Connor. PERRIN Well November 2006 I was working cleaning some windows and I actually fell out of a window, slid down a pitched roof and fell 30 feet landing on my back. The second I hit the floor I knew that I'd broken my back, my legs were gone, literally that second I knew. What goes through your head at a time like that, you know, I was quite healthy, a healthy guy, in my prime - 28 years old - and within a split second I'd become permanently disabled, around 60% of my body will never move or - I can never feel it ever again. And then within a couple of hours later you're told that you're never going to walk and then a couple of days later you find out your insurance company aren't going to pay out. You instantly become homeless, paralysed and you lose everything that you've worked for for your entire life. I was in Stoke Mandeville Hospital for four months, so it's about 200 miles away from where we are here. HOLLINGSWORTH Because you live in Brighton, so Stoke Mandeville is - it's a pretty long round trip. What happened with seeing your wife and didn't you have a new born baby at the time, how old was your son? PERRIN My son was 10 weeks old when I had the injury, it was too far for them to travel and plus my partner's parents became ill, so she found it very difficult to come and visit me. So all in over the four months I probably saw my partner and kids maybe three or four times. HOLLINGSWORTH And what happened when it was time for you to leave hospital? PERRIN I managed to get myself out of hospital on my discharge day and got discharged to a hotel. HOLLINGSWORTH So the time is right for you to leave hospital why were you not able to return home? PERRIN Just because of the shortage of wheelchair accessible properties and you know a lot of councils they don't have any interim properties, they don't have any B&Bs that are wheelchair adapted, they don't have any emergency housing that's wheelchair adapted. HOLLINGSWORTH So what was the council's reaction to this, what did they do for you? PERRIN Well in the end I managed to get them to put me up in hotel, so that I could stay in a hotel nearer my family. Unfortunately though it wasn't ideal, trying to sort of spend your life in a hotel room is a lot different when all you needed was a home. Every few weeks I was moved from one hotel to another without sort of any warning they'd literally ring up and say right you need to move hotel today. HOLLINGSWORTH And since then, I'm very pleased to say, I'm sat now in your fantastic adapted home, how long have you been here? PERRIN We moved in here in July and the place is fantastic. It's fully adapted, wheelchair accessible and the better thing is the local council here are planning to build a lot more of them after my case has sort of highlighted the problems that I had. HOLLINGSWORTH Linda Peddy in Willsden Green in London has a similar story. After she left hospital there was no housing and she had to go into a nursing home for 20 months. PEDDY I thought it was really strange because of course nursing homes are for elderly people and I was only in my 30s so it was a shock really to find out that this happens. The staff were absolutely lovely but it's just the place is not designed for younger residents. So all the routines and the food and any activities that are available are for elderly people. So then I finally looked at the place I'm in now and once I'd been offered the place and accepted it it was then another nine months for all the adaptations to be completed. Then I moved in. HOLLINGSWORTH Nine months for the adaptations - I can't believe that, I mean this house, it's not like it needs to be completely rehauled, why on earth did it take so long to get that done? PEDDY It was just one bad situation after the other. It took a while for the council's occupational therapist to be able to come and view the property, so they had to reallocate me one, that takes a while. Then the housing department has to apply for a Disabled Facilities Grant. Then at one point the housing association actually withdrew the offer of the property because they said that they needed somebody in the property immediately and they couldn't wait for me to move in indefinitely, so therefore they were not willing to wait for the adaptations to be made to the property in order for me to be able to move in. ACTUALITY Hi Belinda, I'm Victoria. Welcome. Nice to meet you. Good morning. So we are outside one of your - one of your houses here, can I have a quick tour? Absolutely come on in. As you can see it's very easy to get in, no steps. No steps, nice wide doorway. Absolutely. HOLLINGSWORTH But there is hope. I came across a charity called Aspire which helps people cope with life after spinal injury. It's funded and kitted out temporary accommodation to alleviate this problem. I'm at one of their houses with Belinda Millrod, who's Aspire's supported housing manager. It's very homely in here is my first impression. MILLROD Yes absolutely, all of Aspire's houses the ethos is to keep everything looking as homely as possible with very few items that wouldn't go in everyday housing. You'll notice that there are no steps to the house and also that the doorways are much wider. HOLLINGSWORTH Now in this kitchen it doesn't actually look that different to me, what has to be adapted in the kitchen? MILLROD In every Aspire house what we do immediately is make sure that there is a wheelchair accessible hob, which basically means that you can get a chair as close as possible to the hob, the on and off switches are all on the front, no leaning over hot plates. The oven, as you can see, opens sideways rather than down, so you don't actually ever lean across in order to take the food out of the oven. HOLLINGSWORTH These are all things that don't seem to be a great expense to adapt in a home, I mean they all seem sort of quite easy things to change, presumably it's not that expensive to adapt a house, how much would it cost to make these sorts of changes? MILLROD Any house that's built to what's now called lifetime standard homes can be adapted to a wheelchair accessible home for about £4-5,000 max. To adapt this kitchen, different from any other kitchen, you're maybe looking at about £1500-£1800. HOLLINGSWORTH Now just looking out of the kitchen windows, a gorgeous day here today, I can see a bit of a garden, does that belong to this house, how do we get to the garden? MILLROD It does in fact, through our level access door, again no steps. HOLLINGSWORTH Brilliant, let's go and have a look at that. It's great to be able to have a garden as well isn't it, I mean it's all very well being able to cook for yourself and use the bathroom but to be able to just come outside and sit in the sunshine, that must be - must mean an awful lot to people that come and stay here. MILLROD We don't want people to come out of hospital, get to an Aspire property, shut the door and have nothing to do, it needs to be close to shops, and it needs to have a way to get out, enjoy the sun, put up the laundry, do some gardening, anything else that you would do went home. HOLLINGSWORTH Now a lot of people I don't think are going to be very familiar with this problem of being discharged from hospital after a spinal injury and not being able to go home, basically being homeless, can you put a figure on how many people are affected by this each year? MILLROD Every year we know statistically there are between a thousand and 1200 people who are newly injured during any given year. Of those about two thirds are not able to go home, not directly home. People wind up in nursing homes, people wind up living in family homes which are inaccessible, they don't have access to showers, to loos, they wind up living in hostels, some wind up living in hotels. Our programme is designed so that hopefully nobody has to do that, that people are able to come and live temporarily with us and move on back to their home once their homes have been adapted. And as far as what the government can do there needs to be far more wheelchair accessible homes built around this country. The figures that we've been hearing are that there are about 300,000 homes that are needed to fill this gap for people - for wheelchair use. All of this means that if every house was built today to lifetime standard we would be able to alleviate this much quicker, it's not that difficult to find. HOLLINGSWORTH Now I've seen your lovely house here which provides people with temporary accommodation, how long can people stay in the Aspire homes and how many do you actually have around the country? MILLROD We currently have 10, we're going to double that by the end of this year. We hope that people don't actually ever have to stay with us for more than six, possibly nine, months at a stretch. But this really depends on how quickly local authorities can arrange for new housing for a lot of the clients that we support. DFG grants, which are Disabled Facility Grants, ways of adapting homes, everything seems to take far too long. If any of this could be streamlined the length of time that anybody would stay with us would be much less. ACTUALITY Hi, I'm here to see Baroness Andrews. What's your name? Victoria Hollingsworth. Victoria Hollingsworth. One moment, let me just check it for you. HOLLINGSWORTH Having heard these stories I really wanted to know why people like Ricky and Linda have ended up in these situations. So I've come to the department for communities in local government to speak to the parliamentary under secretary of state Baroness Kay Andrews. ANDREWS Hello, nice to see you. HOLLINGSWORTH Nice to meet you. So Baroness if you could just start by outlining the latest government strategies for housing. ANDREWS Well all public homes, all housing association homes for example, will be built to lifetime home standards by 2011, so the public sector's leading the way here and we want all homes to be built to 20 - to lifetime home standards by 2013. We'll be working with industry to achieve that but if industry don't do what we want as fast as we want although we'll help them do that we'll also be looking at regulation in due course. HOLLINGSWORTH So in - brilliant about the public sector being compulsory to be built to lifetime standards but in terms of sort of private developers what sort of incentive do they have do you think to make them adaptable and to make these changes sooner rather than waiting for you to have to make it compulsory? ANDREWS Well the big incentive is that there is a huge market for these homes because the housing market itself is being driven by older people who want to move into well designed flexible homes which really are appropriate as they grow older. Forty eight per cent of the growth in all households between now and 2026 will be headed by an older person, now that's the greatest possible incentive for the market to provide the homes people want. HOLLINGSWORTH And in terms of disabled housing as well, there's I think at the moment over 300,000 shortfalls - houses needed for wheelchair users so that's brilliant we've got long term strategy in place but what about the interim, what can we do now? ANDREWS Well the lifetime home standards of course will help the homes of the future, as you say, because they provide for things like wider doorways or level access. But one of the things we have been able to do is to increase the amount of money going to the Disabled Facilities Grant, that'll have gone up by 30% by 2010-11 and that means that we will be able to raise the capital limit to 30,000. So the more expensive adaptations, for example, will be able to be funded, that will help people in wheelchairs a great deal and we'll be able to reach more people because we're putting more money into it and making it more accessible and easier for local authorities to use that money to better effect. HOLLINGSWORTH One thing I came across when speaking to people that have been caught up with this issue is that accessing the Disabled Facilities Grant is really difficult, there's an enormous amount of red tape and it seems to take a long time and waiting even six months is too long if you're having to sort of wash yourself in the kitchen sink and are you going to do anything about tackling - sort of streamlining this process? ANDREWS I've got every sympathy with that because I've met people in that situation myself and it's a great frustration. So we are introducing ways of using money more flexibly, which will speed up the process, we're going to take off some of the means tests, so it'll be easier for poorer people to fill in the forms and get the forms processed more quickly. And this is not by any means a finished process, this is precisely what we will be working on now to achieve a speedier and simpler system. You're quite right, we really need actually to achieve that. HOLLINGSWORTH Do you think it's going to increase the cost of housing - making all these adaptations? ANDREWS No I don't. We have actually costed what it will take to build in lifetime home standards for a new build home and it works out at about £550 and really in relation to the cost of a new home that really isn't that high is it. HOLLINGSWORTH I guess at the end of the day we've just got a massive shortfall of houses and the amount of wheelchair accessible homes that are needed now it's not possible to meet them but it's good to see that there's - the strategy's in place that's hopefully going to make a change there. ANDREWS Yes it is terribly important because if you're in a wheelchair you need space for manoeuvrability, you need walls that can be shifted so that you can actually get more space. And when you move into a lifetime home you won't have everything you need for wheelchair accessibility but it'll be much easier to make the bigger adaptations if you need to have them. And that's - we're working with [Indistinct word] Association, for example, and that's precisely the sort of thing. Like the Papworth Trust has developed for its own wheelchair users, there are very good ideas out there about how we do it and we'll be following this up in every respect. HOLLINGSWORTH And just finally. Do you think that you will put greater pressure on private developers to make their new builds lifetime standard? ANDREWS Well what we have said clearly in the strategy is that for the first time we have a way of going forward which will help developers understand the nature of the standards, what they have to do and how to achieve them and we will have a brack working party, so called, alongside them helping to support this process so they will be - they'll have security to know that they can achieve this. Back to the Transcripts homepage Back to the You and Yours homepage The 麻豆约拍 is not responsible for external websites

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