It’s the hottest item of the moment; the past years there has been a significant increase of reports of confused people. A lot of people blame the savings on the healthcare for psychically ill people.

In 90% of the municipalities the number of reports has increased the past 5 years. In 140 of those the number of reports has even doubled. This is alarming. The reports also meant that police was needed more often to help those people and prevent inconveniences.

The government considers this news as urgent and is busy with finding a solution to this issue. The issue has been looked at by different people, and by the media of course. Some blame the savings on the physical healthcare, which mean for some of the confused people that they can no longer be helped in a special home but get help at their own place. This means there are too many people who are not looked after, according to sources. On the other hand, it is said that the savings and the increased number of confused people are not linked. The ‘kinds’ of confused people are diverse, varying from addicted, to dementing elderly, to psychologically ill people. So the savings are not the cause according to them.

According to me, this is certainly an important issue, which should be investigated carefully. I think it is very important to be sure that people get the healthcare they need to prevent them from becoming confused, either in special home or by the right attention at their place, which is not the case for everyone at the moment. At the moment there are a lot of problems considering the shift from special homes to help in the living place, which means that people don’t get the help they need, or aren’t able to get help at all.

Besides, it is important to find out what makes the people confused; what’s the cause exactly and what can be done about this? Municipalities should play a big role in this task because they are probably best-skilled to solve those problems on a small scale, so that the confused people are treated as individuals. In this way all specific cases can be analysed so that the causes become clear in every specific area. Following, the healthcare section can react, to solve this and prevent more cases.

This might solve this complicated issue. Because it gets me quite confused…