'One of the greatest acts of love is simply bearing witness to the vicissitudes of ageing'

An article on the Guardian newspaper website makes one of the best cases for visiting one's relatives and - by implication - for the listening skills of Anna Chaplains and Anna Friends.

Cancer specialist Dr Ranjana Srivastava writes poignantly of observing how comparatively few elderly patients are receiving visits from family or friends. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/sep/24/why-do-children-of-elderly-patients-stay-away-loneliness-makes-them-sicker-longer?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other

As part of their ward rounds and triage process she and her team assess medical details as well as 'scrutinise the social circumstances': Does the patient lives alone? She notes that about 35% of people over 85 do. To what extent do they have family support?

'Is there any home help? (the waitlist for services is painfully long).'

'Who takes them out and how often? From the time patients enter the hospital, we need to know what it will take to get them safely out of hospital.'

'The doctor recounts one conversation she had with a man in in his nineties:

“Sir, do you have any family?”

“My children.”

“Where are they?”

“I don’t know.”

It will be three full days before we manage to contact someone.'

Where a patient does receive regular visits from relatives there is a marked difference in their situation and potential outcome.

'We see how the most useful “intervention” was the physical presence and moral support of the patient’s children... what we also know for sure is that loneliness makes elderly patients get sicker and stay sicker for longer: doctors can’t medicate the way out of this societal malady.'

'No one I know finds attending to the needs of ageing parents convenient or necessarily desirable' Dr Srivastava continues. 'After all, it is surely a rite of passage to drive your parents nuts and then be driven nuts by your parents. But it seems to me that those who show up don’t frame it as a matter of choice but, rather, priority. And if you consider something or someone your priority, you are more likely to make the time.'

'I don’t know the answer but I see the dilemma. Hospitals packed with elderly people whose every problem is magnified by loneliness and a dearth of love and attention. Our costliest medicines don’t touch them and the fleeting kindness of strangers is unfortunately just that.

I have begun to think that one of the greatest acts of love is simply bearing witness to the vicissitudes of ageing.

Better social policies might help but they will never replace individual obligation.'

Dr Ranjana Srivastava is an Australian oncologist, award-winning author and Fulbright scholar. She wrote, A Better Death: Conversations about the art of living and dying well (Simon and Schuster). Her latest book is Every Word Matters: Writing to Engage the Public (Simon and Schuster, 2025).