Category Archives: hospital

Will they listen to the nurses and take action?

Stirling University to lead UK’s largest patient care study

Nurse at desk Nurses will be questioned on how they perceive the standard of care on wards

The University of Stirling is to lead the UK’s largest ever study into patient experiences and the delivery of frontline health care.

About 6000 patients and almost 1000 nurses and health professionals will take part in the Improving Patient Experience of Care (IPEC) project.

The two year study will also involve academics from Dundee and Glasgow Caledonian universities.

The researchers hope the results can be used to improve patient care.

IPEC’s principal researcher is Prof Brian Williams, Director of the Nursing, Midwifery and Allied Health Professionals Research Unit.

Improving care

Prof Williams said: “There have been a number of major initiatives in recent years designed to help frontline healthcare staff improve the care experience.

More compassion and help is needed for the people who do the caring!

Cameron wants care and compassion? He’d do well to show some himself

It’s the norm now for the people who clean up after others to be unimportant, poorly paid and denied rights. That’s got to change

Gloria Foster death

Gloria Foster, pictured here on her wedding day, who died earlier this month after lying alone for nine days due to care agency failure. It’s about cultural values versus economic ones, writes Deborah Orr

It may have been the “apparently high mortality rates in patients admitted as emergencies” that prompted the first of many investigations into Stafford Hospital. But it’s the reports of bedridden patients lying in their own urine and excrement that illustrate the depth of the “systemic failure” at the hospital. Because everybody knows that isn’t right. You need no training – medical or otherwise – no management expertise or experience, no special “vocation” or long-honed skill, to understand that you don’t do that to animals, let alone humans.

And that, in a nutshell, is the problem. Our intensely hierarchical economic system runs on specialisation – the attainment of qualifications, the accumulation of experience, the possession of skill, talent, instinct, flair, ruthlessness, the ability to manage or make money, all wrapped up in a bundle that makes an individual special and unique. So the things that all humans are expected to comprehend, and be able to turn their hand to, have no value.

I’m not just talking about the NHS. Of course, hospitals contain concentrated numbers of people who can’t get to the loo by themselves, and a lack of cleanliness can and does have sometimes fatal consequences. So the general failure to reward “menial” tasks is particularly egregious in hospitals.

Campaigning for Justice after the harrowing death of her mother

Mum’s death meant I HAD to fight for justice, says woman who spearheaded campaign after the death of her mother at Stafford Hospital

By Julie Bailey

PUBLISHED: 22:37, 6 February 2013 | UPDATED: 08:55, 7 February 2013

 

Long fight: Julie Bailey, who has campaigned for justice at Stafford Hospital since her mother Bella died at the hospital in 2007 Long fight: Julie Bailey, who has campaigned for justice at Stafford Hospital since her mother Bella died there in 2007

After the harrowing death of her mother at Stafford Hospital, Julie Bailey campaigned to bring those responsible to account. Yesterday, her courage was finally vindicated.

The other night, I had a recurring dream – one which comes back to haunt me regularly, and leaves me sweat-drenched, shaken and bereft.

A nurse is standing in front of me, hands planted firmly on her hips, refusing to fetch the drugs which will save my mother’s life. Mum is gasping for breath, her rheumy eyes gazing at me in terror and her nails digging into my hand.

The nurse is ignoring her dying gasps, but is shouting at me instead. ‘I’ll decide when to call a doctor,’ she screams.

Then, without fail, I wake up and remember that most of my dream did happen. But in reality, no doctor was fetched. My mother died within hours – in a Third World hellhole known as Stafford Hospital.

Yesterday, the long-awaited report into failings at the hospital found that between 400 and 1,200 patients died needlessly.

My 86-year-old mother Bella was one of them. She passed away on November 8, 2007, and from the moment I lost her, I’ve fought to expose the indifference, cruelty and neglect which I witnessed over eight horrendous weeks when I refused to leave her side in the ward.

Mum was admitted to Stafford Hospital that September with a hernia. When I left her, I asked the nurse if she could be given something for her pain. But when I returned the next morning, Mum was agitated.