Is Britain's county of West Sussex no place for old men with Alzheimer's disease ?

Alzheimer's disease strips the old men and women who suffer from its symptoms of their independence and dignity.

Now, the county of West Sussex in England is one where people with dementia are being fitted with GPS tracking devices, enabling carers to find them should they take themselves off and go missing.

Under the pilot scheme, a joint project between Sussex Police and Chichester District Council, 15 dementia patients have been given the devices and if it proves successful, it will be copied across the county. It is hoped that this could help to alleviate the strain on all those involved with a person with Alzheimer’s.
The police hope it will save thousands of pounds spent on frequent call-outs to search for missing dementia patients, which can involve using helicopters to locate them.

The campaign group, the National Pensioners’ Convention, however, has expressed outrage that dementia patients are being ‘tagged’ in  this way, claiming it demonises them and treats them like criminals.
The Convention’s Dot Gibson likened it to ‘fixing an ASBO to a dementia patient who isn’t able to decide one way or another whether they want one’. In addition, the use of tags was 'another way of putting a sticking plaster over a problem that arises because there are cuts and budget problems in the social care system'.

Barbara Pointon has cause to disagree with Dot because :

* when he was only 51, her husband Malcolm was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, was fit and strong and if she locked him in, would kick down the door or lift the garden gate off its hinges, she couldn't keep him in, yet if he went out, he would get lost.

* with no idea of where he had gone, she would have to get in the car and drive around, sometimes for up to an hour, searching for him, utterly panic-stricken as they lived only a mile from the M11 motorway.

* over time, Malcolm lost the power of speech and became unable to perform the simplest tasks for himself, but the most upsetting thing was his disappearances because he had completely lost his sense of direction, had no memory of familiar places and signs because one of the hallmarks of Alzheimer’s is that the brain misinterprets what the eyes are seeing.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b4eXJi50EMI

* Malcolm died in 2007, aged only 66, after living with Alzheimer’s for 16 years, except for a break of two years when he lived in a care home, she was his carer for 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

* would have loved a GPS device which could have told her where he was and would have given him and her more liberty and saved her endless, anxious hours searching for him.

* she feels desperately guilty about the two years Malcolm spent in a care home, where his condition deteriorated radically and he lost his mobility and, worst of all his freedom, and feels that if she'd had a GPS device, might have felt able to carry on at home, because it would have given her a feeling of security.

Barbara and Malcolm became the subjects of an award-winning documentary in 1999 :
'Malcolm and Barbara...... A Love Story' and the 2007 update :
'Malcolm and Barbara....Love's Farewell'.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XgoWcE3Ecqc

If anyone is, Barbara is clearly an exponent of 'The Power of Love' :
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fnhdDV34RD0

There are 800,000 people in Britain with dementia, mostly old men and women, and the figure that it’s estimated will rise to one million by 2021 as the old Britons live longer.