For several years now I've been running a weekly music-making group in conjunction with a local Day Centre, the one I refer to as "My Favourite Day Centre" in these pages.
The Day Centre is being closed down, at some point later this year. No one seems to know exactly when, but the latest guesstimate is "August sometime."
How you're supposed to plan your life when you've no clue when your job is going to end, I don't know. Maybe the Powers That Be are keeping everyone who works at the Day Centre in suspense so that they will go off and find other jobs, and not have to be paid redundancy packages.
Not that the redundancy packages they're being offered are worth much. Oh, don't get me started.
I realised some time ago that the regular music group at the Day Centre was going to have to end. Service users are leaving in droves. But what really upset me was the fact that many of them are leaving (or, more accurately, being taken away) without any prior notice. They've been turning up at the Day Centre on a Friday morning, and then in the afternoon their support workers or parents have come to pick them up and told the staff at the centre - "Oh, {insert name} won't be coming back on Monday. This was his or her last day."
Two or three of my most long-standing musicians have left in this way, without my having a chance to say goodbye, or to mark the occasion, or to express how I felt about losing their company and their contribution to the group. Neither has the music group had the chance to simply say "thank you" to the members who have left. The staff had no time - literally - to even run out and buy some cakes from the supermarket or at the very least a little "Good Luck" card.
My personal feeling is that this is a disgraceful way to treat people.
I see many instances where, with the best will in the world, disabled people are still having little control over what happens to them. I appreciate that it can be hard to engage a person in the decision-making process if they are apparently unable to engage with any process whatsoever; if they cannot/will not move or speak or communicate in any of the other ways available to them. But is that any reason to act in a way that seems to assume they have no feelings about change? One man I know was not taken to his own mother's funeral, for no adequate reason. I'm hard pressed to even INVENT an 'adequate reason', frankly. I cried when I heard that.
Another young man I know - let's call him Trevor - has had his activities budget cut so that he can only attend a day centre two days a week rather than his accustomed five. The day centre he attends is, for him, like a vocation. He loves going there, immersing himself fully in the activities and even the running of the place. His friends are there. But since the cut in his activities budget Trevor has had to stay home three out of five weekdays and, because of the circumstances where he lives, he is not able to go anywhere else on such days.
I sincerely hope that Trevor is able to find something else that he can do with his time and his attention when he is not at his day centre, and that he doesn't grieve for it too much and fall into a depression, which can and does happen to people very frequently in situations like this.
In the meantime I discover that Trevor's day centre has recently taken on a young woman with such profound needs that it is impossible to say whether or not her attendance is actually improving her quality of life in any way whatsoever. Because of her level of care and specialised transport, it costs a little under £1,000 A DAY to send her to the day centre. It costs £45 a day for Trevor to attend.
Someone tell me please, how that is justified.
I'm listening.
