recognised as one of the most influential disabled people in the UK<\/a> for her pioneering work supporting communication using eye movement.<\/p>\nShe was admitted to East Surrey hospital last April with pneumonia and suffered further complications which prolonged her stay.<\/p>\n
She wanted to be discharged back to her own home, but this did not happen.<\/p>\n
Instead, her mother Christine Ritchie says care commissioners at NHS Sussex All Age Continuing Care (AACC) told them Ritchie would be going to a nursing home.<\/p>\n
Ritchie refused.<\/p>\n
On the day she was transferred, Ritchie told the BBC she was “devastated” and wanted to get back to her own home.<\/p>\n
More recently, she explained: “In my own home, with my nurses, I feel safe and can see my friends and family easily.<\/p>\n
“My dad visits me almost daily. I can have meetings easily and I am not dictated to by the home rules or policies.”<\/p>\n
She said living at home gave her agency and control of her own surroundings – and the ability to use a wheelchair-adapted van to go out to events, shopping and university.<\/p>\n
“Life will not be worth living if I cannot go home,” she said.<\/p>\n
When she was taken from East Surrey Hospital to Temple Grove Nursing Home, Ritchie’s mother said her powered wheelchair was “switched off and pushed”.<\/p>\n
“She didn’t consent to go,” she told the BBC. “It’s absolutely horrific.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Ritchie has Ehlers-Danlos syndrome, a condition that affects the joints; functional neurological disorder, which impacts her mobility; Addison’s…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":300752,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[34],"tags":[134,527,111,139,69],"class_list":{"0":"post-300751","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-healthcare","8":"tag-health","9":"tag-healthcare","10":"tag-new-zealand","11":"tag-newzealand","12":"tag-nz"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/300751","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=300751"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/300751\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/300752"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=300751"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=300751"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=300751"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}