Not For The Squeamish

The excellent Dr. Crippen has posted a blog entry about the Monday morning surgery from hell that is emphatically not for the squeamish. In fact, as I nearly fainted a few weeks ago when watching some surgical procedure in House (sad but true, my wife needed to put me in the recovery position) - I read the text but rapidly had to close my eyes and rely on my wife for a vague description of the photograph of the infamous pressure sore. The truly shocking story is at the end of Monday's entry: as with many of Dr. Crippen's posts, it is gut-wrenching, but you have been warned that it is more than usually so if you choose to look at the photograph.

Several of the entries for this infamous Monday morning are about carers. They call for a new airing of the tired lexicon of condemnation. Caregivers who are in despair about the level of care given to the person for whom they are caring when they are in hospital (neither cleaned nor fed). And carers who know that they are the victims of their own competence and will only qualify for more assistance if their own health undergoes a significant decline. Ruefully, one carer summed it up:

Trouble is, she is looking after her husband really well. So when social services “assess” her, she is classified as low need. She knows the system. She worked in it herself. “The best thing I could do is have a heart attack, then we would be high need” she says.

This account from a GP's surgery that could be somewhere near you is a bundling of the daily distress experienced by carers and a ghastly example of yesterday's report on elder abuse. Yet, as this took place in a hospital that could plead substantial staff shortages, does it somehow not fall within the legal framework that would allow the hospital to be prosecuted? Does it somehow fall under a Crown Properties exemption?

Many years ago my wife fractured a femur and was sent to a long-stay home while the fracture mended. There were no beds free in the general ward and so, on a temporary basis, she was admitted to the ward for the "mentally handicapped" as they were then known. The nurses were so accustomed to none of the girls on that ward being able to speak that they didn't talk to my wife. Accustomed to a daily bed bath in her previous hospital, my wife wasn't bathed again during the week that she was there. She had previously been turned every few hours to prevent pressure sores, but she was never turned in this new ward. She was both longer and wider than the bed - if she wanted to change her position, she had to rest her head on the bedside table. For many of the meal-times, the nurses left the food on the tray at the end of her bed where my wife couldn't reach it. When the food was collected the nurses sometimes commented, "Weren't you hungry?" but didn't expect an intelligible reply so didn't hear her say, "I couldn't reach the tray".

At the end of the week, when my wife's parents were able to visit her, they were shocked by her physical condition. Against medical advice, they took her home to nurse her, but she was already suffering from an infection that she had picked up in that hospital. Some time later, the Sunday Times printed a notorious expose of the conditions in hospitals and wards for the "mentally handicapped". There was an outcry about the conditions and the levels of abuse that were sanctioned. I thought that both socially and professionally we had moved on from a climate in which that standard of care was acceptable - judging by Dr. Crippen's appalling story, we haven't.

Copyright 2006, Tony Plant Happystance Project