Phyllis was a nurse at Sunnyside Royal Hospital (Montrose, Scotland) in the 60′s; the poem was published in the poetry anthology “Elders” in 1973.

Just for fun, here’s Phoebe Hesketh’s “Geriatric Ward”, a slightly different ‘and IMHO better) spin on the same situation:
…
Feeding time in the geriatric ward;
I wondered how they found their mouths,
and seeing that not one looked up, inquired
‘Do they have souls?’

‘If I had a machine-gun,’ answered the doctor
‘I’d show you dignity in death instead of living death.
Death wasn’t meant to be kept alive.
But we’re under orders
to pump blood and air in after the mind’s gone.
I don’t understand souls;
I only learned about cells
law-abiding as leaves
withering under frost.
But we, never handing over
to mother who knows best,
spray cabbages with oxygen, hoping for a smile,
count pulses of breathing bags whose direction is lost,
and think we’ve won.

Here’s a game you can’t win –
One by one they ooze away in the cold.
There’s no society forbidding
this dragged-out detention of the old-’
…
Sorry, folks