The Patients Association highlights appalling standards of NHS hospital care for the elderly, giving examples of patients left dehydrated or lying in faeces, blood and urine.

BBC News reports that many elderly patients are receiving appalling care in NHS Hospitals.

The Patients Association highlights appalling standards of NHS hospital care for the elderly, giving examples of patients left dehydrated or lying in faeces, blood and urine.

Claire Rayner, formerly a nurse, now President of the Patients Association said: "I am sickened by what has happened to some part of my profession of which I was so proud. These bad, cruel nurses may be - probably are - a tiny proportion of the nursing workforce, but even if they are only one or two per cent of the whole they should be identified and struck off the Register."

Government chief nursing officer Chris Beasley said: "All patients deserve the highest quality of care from the NHS and the poor care received in these cases is simply unacceptable." Apologists for poor standards of NHS 'care' customarily add, as Chris Beasley adds here in this report, that the 'vast majority of patients experience good quality, safe and effective care."

I am willing to concede that possibly a slight majority of patients are reasonably satisfied, but to claim this to be a 'vast' majority is way off the mark. Most people put up with a lot of substandard care, knowing that complaints are unwelcome and tend to provoke reprisals, this being particularly the case with the more vulnerable and elderly, frail patients.

Claire Rayner has some well-justified criticisms of the NHS and some suggestions to improve it.

NHS at 60: In the end I had to go private
Article in the Sunday Telegraph

Extracts:

"In 1988 she suffered chest pains. Efforts to contact a local doctor at 3am led instead to a locum service, which insisted she find her NHS number before any help could be given. "In the end we gave up and got through the night, but next day we signed up with a private GP," she says.

The chest pains revealed a hole in her diaphragm, while arthritis has since resulted in her having five knee operations and surgery to both shoulders. In 2002, breast cancer led to a double mastectomy. She used an NHS hospital on two occasions and was infected by the superbug MRSA.

"The tissue on my knee suddenly split, and I had to go to Accident and Emergency," she says. "For four hours, I was left in a highly infected room with a totally exposed wound. For at least an hour I could see the doctor sitting gossiping with a colleague.

"When she came over her hair wasn't tied back, then she used the wrong kind of gauze to patch me up. I felt so angry. When I discovered afterwards that I had MRSA I was appalled, but I wasn't all that surprised."

Now, she and her husband, Des, who is 80, avoid the NHS. "I have a list of hospitals with lower infection rates that I would go to if I was desperate, but we avoid it when we can. I'm embarrassed and ashamed to admit it, but I had to put my health first."

Determined to use her public profile as Patients Association president to achieve better services, Mrs Rayner urges the NHS's political masters to learn from the values and standards she saw in the service's early years."

"Now, as the NHS is about to turn 60, Mrs Rayner offers hospitals a three-point prescription to return the service to robust health.

"Firstly I would get rid of the nurses' station on the ward. It is a hiding place for them to hang around gossiping. Secondly, I would get rid of the targets. Third, get rid of all the middle layers of management and all the deceit to meet targets that happens as a result.""

Elderly nursing home residents left in pain by care staff

Scandal of elderly left in pain by care staff

Extract:

"Elderly people in nursing homes are being left in "shocking pain" says a survey today, with two in five saying they are in constant agony, and others admitting to having suicidal thoughts.

The research, conducted confidentially among residents whose average age was 82, reveals the extent to which the frail and vulnerable are made to suffer unnecessarily.

It was carried out by the Patients Association, the independent lobby group led by Claire Rayner, a former nurse and midwife and well-known agony aunt."

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