Posted on October 7 2025

I'm 52 years old. Until I collapsI ed at home in October 2023, I was a working man — a retired infantry soldier and a bodyguard. Today, I am disabled, reliant on NHS services and adult social care, and desperately fighting to be a meaningful father to my three young children, aged ten, six, and two.

My reliance is a burden my wife should not have to carry alone. Yet, I have exhausted every formal avenue available to obtain the structured care I need to participate in family life — not merely to exist alongside it.

On 26 September 2025, I met with my local MP’s casework team to set out, in person, a catalogue of systemic failings I have experienced. These failures are not merely inconvenient; they reduce my independence, increase my isolation from my young family, and place an unnecessary, crushing strain on my wife, who bears the brunt of my complex needs.

My detailed submission, outlining systemic failures and structural neglect, was intended to drive political action. Ten days later, on Monday 6 October 2025, I received a call from my GP surgery informing me that the complexity of my life had been reduced to a soundbite:

“Mr Wentworth isn’t happy because he can’t get a GP appointment.”

This erasure is precisely the problem. My letter was not about a single appointment; it was about the breakdown of systems designed for the easily managed, not the complicated reality of a disabled, working-age father. It was a failure that proves the system is geared towards managing decline, not enabling rehabilitation and family life.

The True Timeline: From Trauma to Catastrophe and Back

The failure of the system is best illustrated by my journey through it — a chaotic chain of transfers and misjudgements that turned my care into a series of life-threatening events.

My medical crisis began in October 2023, when I was admitted to the Norfolk and Norwich University Hospital following a collapse. I was diagnosed with Functional Neurological Disorder (FND), attributed to my PTSD from military service. During routine scans, a brain aneurysm was discovered.

I was transferred to Addenbrooke’s Hospital for assessment, where surgeons declared the aneurysm stable and only in need of monitoring after one week. I was promptly returned to the Norfolk and Norwich until February 2024, before finally being moved to a Neurological Rehabilitation Centre.

Then, on 3 April 2024, the supposedly stable aneurysm ruptured. The subsequent subarachnoid haemorrhage almost killed me. My wife was warned that I would likely not survive the emergency transfer back to Addenbrooke’s for surgery. I spent four weeks there fighting for my life, followed by another three weeks back at the Norfolk and Norwich, awaiting a rehabilitation bed, before finally returning to the rehabilitation centre until my discharge in September 2024.

This timeline shows that my disability is the cumulative result of unmet military trauma, catastrophic medical error, and fragmented care — a history that demanded seamless, integrated services. Instead, the system gave me fragmentation, chaos, and a near-death experience. Yet the system responds by saying I am “too complicated”.

The Failure of a System Built for Yesterday

The crisis lies not with the dedicated staff, but with a system that fails to recognise, resource, or integrate the needs of younger, disabled adults and their families.

Real Examples of Systemic Failure

My experience highlights how systems routinely fail working-age adults with complex, acquired disabilities:

1. Unreasonable Waits and the Elderly Default:
   An occupational therapist identified that I required a stairlift. Instead of arranging installation, the council imposed a wait of 15 months for another assessment. This elderly-focused process of endless reassessment is institutional neglect — not a mechanism for supporting a disabled man with young children.
2. Tokenistic Care: Guaranteed Failure and Wasted Funding:
   My care plan currently allows one hour per week for “community access”. This is a profound failure to understand my needs that guarantees failure and wastes funding. The physical logistics of transferring me from my chair to the car, and then securely stowing and deploying my wheelchair, take approximately 40 minutes of that 60-minute allocation. This leaves twenty minutes for travel and any meaningful activity. The system is paying for an hour of care knowing that 66% of that time is absorbed by logistics, leaving insufficient time for the intended purpose.
3. Circular Processes and Bureaucratic Dead Ends:
   Too often, I am referred from one service to another — NHS to social services, to occupational therapy, and back again — each time starting from scratch. No one takes ownership. Staff are frequently forced to make decisions they do not believe in because they lack authority, time, or funding.
4. Institutional Absurdity: The Owl Sanctuary Referral:
   After discharge, I was referred to the Specialist Neurological Rehabilitation Outpatient Service. Following a complex, nearly two-hour assessment, they concluded they could not offer me anything. Their official suggestion for my rehabilitation and reintegration into community life? That I might like to volunteer at a local owl sanctuary.
   This is the ultimate insult: a specialist service wasting professional time, failing to provide treatment for a combat veteran with a brain injury, and substituting essential therapy with a token, profoundly inappropriate suggestion.

The Financial Truth: Working-Age Disability Is Not a Side Issue

While Norfolk is renowned for its ageing population, the financial reality of social care proves that my demographic is central to the crisis. Local authorities are struggling because the care of younger adults is highly complex and costly — not because it is an anomaly.

• National Priority, Local Neglect: Nationally, local authorities now spend a similar proportion of money (£10.4 billion) on long-term support for working-age adults as they do on older people (£11.0 billion).
• The Cost of Complexity: Recent analysis shows the cost of providing care for working-age adults is rising faster than for the elderly, driven by the increasing complexity of needs like my own.
• The Funding Gap: Yet here in Norfolk, we are still grappling with a projected budget gap of £44.75 million for 2025–26, leading to proposed savings of £16.52 million from the very Adult Social Services that are already ill-equipped to handle cases like mine.

The system is struggling not just because of the elderly population, but because it structurally undervalues and under-resources the complex, high-cost needs of disabled working-age adults who require community-based support and assistance with family life. The failure to properly assess needs — culminating in the owl sanctuary referral — is actively contributing to overall waste, further proving the case for better funding and competence.

Why I Went to My MP — and Why I Was Silenced

My intention was to shine a light on the structural rot. I went to my MP because my personal difficulties reflected systemic failure: a failure to provide continuity of care, a failure to integrate the NHS and local authorities, and a failure to design services around the lives of parents and professionals.

By reducing my concerns to a single, solvable GP appointment, the MP’s office achieved two things: they sanitised my lived experience, and they protected the broken system from scrutiny. The opportunity to drive genuine reform for working families was erased.

This is how people with disabilities who are not elderly are left behind: their urgent, complex needs are minimised because they do not fit the established box-ticking programme.

What Comes Next: Mobilising the Pen

I will allow my MP and their team a reasonable period to act. But if I see no meaningful change, I will escalate. I survived a subarachnoid haemorrhage and an eleven-month journey from collapse to discharge — through acute care and rehabilitation — to fight for a meaningful life; I will not stop now.

I will publish open letters to ministers and local media, highlighting the crisis for working-age disabled adults. I will collaborate with advocacy groups to gather evidence of how social care fails to support family life for disabled parents. I will submit articles to regional and national publications to force a debate on a social care system that must adapt to support recovery and family enablement — not just palliative management.

I served my country as a soldier. Now, I find myself fighting its broken systems for the support I need to be a father and a husband.

What You Can Do

If you are reading this — whether as a professional, policymaker, or fellow citizen — I ask you to join this fight:

1. Recognise Complexity: Accept that working-age disability and acquired injury require complex, long-term support that integrates physical, mental, and social care.
2. Demand Service Integration: Push for genuine, joined-up services between the NHS and local authorities that cannot dismiss patients as “too complicated”.
3. Reform the Scope of Care: Demand that social care is funded and designed to enable a full life — including family life, employment, and community participation — not just personal hygiene and safe containment.
4. Share Your Story: If you are a disabled parent or working-age adult struggling with the system, your voice is essential. Every story counters the easy soundbites.

Final Word

I am not seeking pity. I am demanding a system capable of competence and compassion. I am calling for leadership that recognises that the cost of inaction is measured not just in budgets, but in the lost years of a father’s life with his young children.

My weapon is no longer a rifle — it is my pen. I will write, I will campaign, and I will not be silenced.

#Dustywentworth

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