LET me tell you about a lady I know. I won’t name her, because I don’t want to add to the stress she’s under by exposing her to the curiosity of strangers.

She is the sole carer for her husband.

He suffers from a severe form of dementia known as Lewy body disease, as well as Parkinson’s.

He has frequent falls. She has arthritis, and he is too heavy for her to pick up unaided.

When he has hospital appointments she can’t manhandle him out of the car, or push him in a wheelchair.

He is also incontinent, and she gets up two or three times every night to deal with the results.

He has had a mild stroke and three TIAs – transient ischaemic attacks, often called ‘mini strokes’.

He also has an abdominal aortic aneurysm – an enlarged artery - which is just below the size classed as life-threatening.

He doesn’t want to go into a home, and she is doing her best to respect his wish, though looking after him is a 24/7 job that has swallowed up years of her own life.

For this heroic undertaking she gets three hours of ‘sitting’ provided by Wiltshire Carer Support.

It really is adult babysitting. The sitters cannot help with personal care or heavy work.

He, meanwhile, gets attendance allowance of £83 a week. Agencies that provide carers charge £20-25 per hour.

She asked the authorities for further financial help but was turned down. She appealed, only to be turned down again. All she’s entitled to at present is £1,700 a year, allegedly to fund four weeks’ respite care.

They must be joking. In any halfway decent nursing home that wouldn’t cover a fortnight.

So this lady wasn’t surprised when she read last week’s Journal front page, reporting that Wiltshire residents with ongoing healthcare needs are missing out on thousands of pounds in NHS funding that they are legally entitled to because the assessment system isn’t working.

If her husband hasn’t got ‘significant ongoing healthcare needs’ then I don’t know who has.

So what is Wiltshire’s Clinical Commissioning Group, which includes local GPs, doing?

It’s in the bottom five per cent of CCGs nationally when it comes to giving out what’s known as ‘Continuing Health Care’ funding. We know its financial position is, to use its chairman’s own description, ‘dire’.

But don’t people like this couple have a legal right to financial support?

The government ought to be ashamed of the way it’s starving our health system of money.

This is an absolute scandal, and without the Journal, you wouldn’t know anything about it.

Remember that next time someone scoffs about the ‘local rag’.

anneriddle36@gmail.com