It’s time to stand up for patients’ rights

When I first started writing this column I wrote about my mother being in hospital in Wales. She was on a trolley for the whole weekend and she had a very difficult time in the ward (when she finally got into a ward). I have in the last year had to go A&E once and I have to say the staff there were amazing, so contradictions.

“If you happened to be asleep or not able to eat it within an hour the food delivery people just came and took it away”

There’s a report going to Jeremy Hunt this week saying that relatives should care for their elderly relatives when they are in hospital – feed them, take them to the toilet etc – as the nurses are under so much pressure. Before that happens, if ever, I would like to suggest my ten commandments which could revolutionise hospital care, particularly for the elderly:

1. Hospitals should be as open on a Saturday or a Sunday as a Tuesday. If Tesco can do it so can the NHS. My mother (90+) was taken in on a Friday and basically left on a trolley till Monday. It was only a week or so later that I discovered that there was practically no chance of her being moved into the ward at the weekend, for at the weekend most services stop.

2. Drugs need to be stopped being used as a solve-all if patients are upset. They should be a last resort not a first resort. An unforgivable number of people, especially the old, leave hospital with psychosis caused by these sedatives.

3. The nursing staff must prioritise time to take the patients to the toilet. At the moment they give patients nappies rather than do this. It makes me incredibly sad to write this. Whatever the age, this is wrong.

4. Nursing staff must accept that some patients, particularly the elderly, need assistance with feeding and drinking. 111 people died of thirst last year while being treated on the wards. This is wholly avoidable and entirely unacceptable.

5. Let the nurses feed the patients if necessary. The food in the hospital my mother was in was delivered by food-delivery people and just left at the end of the bed. If you happened to be asleep or not able to eat it within an hour the food delivery people just came and took it away. 43 hospital patients died of starvation in British hospitals last year. Emma Jones from Leigh Day & Co, which represented some victims in a recent case concerning the Worcestershire Acute NHS Hospitals Trust, said it was the first time in her ten years as a human rights lawyer that she had come across starvation being given as the primary cause of death. As well as the 43 patients who starved to death, 287 people were recorded by doctors as being malnourished when they died in hospital. This is unacceptable.

6. There’s no real effort to compensate for the deaf, graphically illustrated by the fact that the TV sets by the beds in my mother’s hospital did not have subtitles.

7. The wards were cleaned immaculately before the leading doctors came around. The doctors are seen as all-important – they are important but not as important as the patients. The staff should give the patients the same, if not more, respect.

8. Patients need to be treated as individuals. Nurses must be given extra time to talk and care for patients.

9. At the end of the ward where my mother was there were often two or three nurses on computers. They seemed to spend an inordinate amount of time on computers. Why can’t they all be given iPhones or iPads? Then they could make notes as they go round. For instance, when my mother had to go and have a scan in another part of the hospital, a nurse had to come and fill in a form with exactly the same questions as when she was taken into the ward.

10. As Jane Cummings, the Chief Nursing Officer for England, has said, ‘compassion’ should be embedded in public health care.

Recently Ann Clwyd said her beloved husband Owen Roberts died “like a battery hen” after her repeated pleas for NHS nurses to help him were brushed aside. Her 6’2” husband was “squashed up against the iron bars of the bed” and nurses cried “anyone for breakfast?” at the very moment that he died. This was in the University Hospital of Wales, the same hospital my mother was in.

I have written to Ann Clwyd MP offering to help with her campaign for patients’ rights and I am sending this article and the previous one I wrote which you can see at www.thelatest.co.uk to the Minister of Health Jeremy Hunt.
If you wish to help in the campaign please get in touch with me.