Personal Injury Claims Bristol Blog

After Medway NHS Trust was placed under special measures following the Keogh report earlier in the year, the lack of improvement has resulted in the trust being threatened with urgent action or a leadership change if services don’t get better. The hospital trust was put under special measures after major failings were identified across multiple departments.

An NHS report has revealed that last month an 87-year-old man died after an East Midlands Ambulance Service crew lost the keys to their vehicle.  The elderly man had suffered a cardiac arrest on a local golf course, Derbyshire golf pavilion, and died there despite having been provided with treatment.  The report does not explicitly state that the lack of hospital transport was the reason for his death, but it has been listed as one of the eight EMAS incidents that were highlighted as being particularly serious in October.

The government has proposed new legislation that will see willful negligence being treated as a criminal offence under NHS changes that are to be revealed next week.  This decision has been made following the recent Mid Staffordshire scandal and others similar, which will see those guilty of “willful neglect” being sentenced to jail.  If found guilty, the offence will be punishable by up to five years in prison under the Mental Capacity Act.

A coroner has described 63-year-old Mike Martin’s case as “unacceptable” after he had to wait 13 hours in hospital before being taken into surgery, and sadly died during the wait.  Mr Martin was taken into Northampton General Hospital in February 2012 after complaining of such severe pain that he could not lie down – he was then left for 13 hours before surgery was available to him.

With fears on the rise about the standard of basic nursing care in our NHS, a recent BBC clip followed two retired nurses, Trudy O’Connor and Deborah Harrison, to investigate whether or not standards really have slipped.  Having themselves trained in 1968, they believe that the current level of care is not as high as it was when they were nurses.  One of them complained that when her son was in hospital, he was not washed in nine days, and when there, she also witnessed an elderly patient struggling to eat without any assistance from a nurse.

With the Clostridium difficile (C. diff) bug causing major concern within the NHS, a woman has died after frequently complaining about a lack of hand washing in her ward.  Ann Gregory (81), from Colwyn Bay, was being treated at the Clan Clwyd hospital in Denbighshire, and a community hospital, after suffering a stroke.  She had frequently complained to her daughter, Judith Gavin, about the way in which hospital staff took no notice of hand washing reminders, and said she was “appalled” by what she had witnessed in her time at the hospital.