Stafford Hospital let pensioners down with 'appalling' level of care

Mar 22 2009 by Alison Dayani, Sunday Mercury

Pensioners let down by ‘appalling’ level of care

A MIDLAND family’s ailing mother was left for 11 hours on a trolley in shamed Stafford Hospital’s A&E department – and then sent home with a needle sticking out of her arm.

Frail Olive Loydall, 85, died shortly after the traumatic ordeal – and last night her family called for the boss of the Trust, blasted in a damning Healthcare Commission report last week, to face criminal proceedings.

Anne Castledine and her partner John Roberts said they wouldn’t have even sent their dog to be treated in Stafford Hospital after the way medics dealt with Anne’s mother.

Mr Roberts, from Parson’s Drive, Gnosall, Stafford, said they had been demanding answers from hospital bosses for two years.

“My mother-in-law was rushed into A&E with heart problems after having a triple by-pass operation, but they just left her on a trolley suffering on her own for 11 hours,” said angry Mr Roberts.

“They lost her medication and just before midnight, they sent her packing with an injection cannula still in her arm. She was a vulnerable old woman. She didn’t even have any house keys on her and had to come and wake us up because she couldn’t get into her bungalow. That’s when I saw the needle still sticking out of her arm.”

The family met with former Mid Staffordshire Trust chief Martin Yeates, who stepped down two weeks before the damning Healthcare Commission report, which was published last week. It revealed that more than 1,000 deaths could have been unnecessarily caused by “appalling” standards of care at Stafford Hospital over a three-year period. “The buck rests with the boss,” said Mr Roberts. “The way Mr Yeates ran that hospital is tantamount to corporate murder.

Other victims of Stafford Hospital’s failures include 77 year-old Cannock pensioner Lillian Tucker, who had a known penicillin allergy when she was admitted to the hospital with a fractured pelvis in October 2005 but was wrongly injected with a penicillin-based drug.

Mrs Tucker suffered a heart attack and severe brain damage as a result, and never regained consciousness.

Her son Dave Tucker said: “In its letter of apology to us the hospital claimed it had learned valuable lessons – but the day after mum died we heard there had been another similar case at the same hospital years earlier. I’m very angry that lessons were not learned.”