Queen's Speech

Baroness Knight of Collingtree Excerpts

Thursday 3rd June 2010 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Knight of Collingtree]

My Lords, it has been a delightful and somewhat unusual experience to sit here hour after hour today hearing a deluge of praise and kindness showered upon my noble friends on the Front Bench. Every word was said with such meaning. I appreciate it very much and would like to make it clear that we on this side of the House are just as delighted to see my noble friends on the Front Bench in government as members of the Opposition have kindly suggested.

The stated aims of the Government’s new health Bill are excellent. There has long been a crying need to improve basic healthcare for our citizens. I thoroughly approve of doctors and patients being given greater control. There should be devolution of power and responsibility in the NHS. We all understand that there must be management of the hotel side of our hospitals—the laundry, the cleaning and the cooking—but people who know nothing about medicine are not the ones who should be the captains of the hospital ship, as they often seem to be.

Administrators are not the best people to improve bad standards. They are far more likely to sack a whistleblower than to listen to the complaint and try to do better. Even when I have complained about the disgraceful treatment of patients, the reaction has invariably been outrage that I should dare to criticise and flat denials that anything at all is ever wrong with the treatment of patients rather than what I would have far preferred: an apology and a promise to investigate and do better. I have always been very careful to report only cases where I can give names, dates, witnesses, addresses, ages and the hospital where the incident occurred. Your Lordships will have often heard me speak in this House of such cases. Many have been of patients who have been given neither food nor water, or—and I find that this is extremely common—whose food has quite deliberately been placed too far away for them to reach and has then been whipped away untouched with not even the slightest offer to try to help them with feeding. Those who have no one to watch out or speak up for them are in terrible trouble. Some time ago, an elderly man in exactly that situation was actually filmed on TV as he starved and died.

There are many, many cases of patients being treated without care or compassion. Relations often fear to complain, in my experience. Sometimes they say, “Well, he’s dead anyway, we can’t bring him back, and if I complain I will really be in trouble because that complaint will go down against me and my care may suffer when I need it”. One instance has been cited a number of times by many different sources. A patient begs, even screams, for help to get to the lavatory, but is completely ignored and given no help at all. Eventually, helpless, they let loose in the bed, and what happens? They lie in the mess sometimes for hours before anyone comes to wash and change the sheets. Sometimes the excuse is that there is a wait until the next team comes on in the morning, but often no notice is taken at all of their predicament, which is appalling. I have absolutely no doubt that there are still angels among the nursing fraternity—we have some of them in this House—but I am afraid that they are a lot rarer than they used to be.

Only eight days ago, one major newspaper reported two quite separate examples on two quite separate pages of the lack of the most basic standard of care: one in a private home, and one in the NHS. The former was an 84 year-old man who was placed there because his wife could no longer care for him. He had Alzheimer’s and was both deaf and blind. After only one day, the first family visitor to see him found him on all fours, wearing only a nappy and covered with bruises and dried blood. When he was admitted, he had three bed sores. A few days later he had 18, all of which were covered with dirty dressings. He died six days later as a result of no proper treatment for the sores. The noble Baroness, Lady Masham, spoke of a similar case. Sadly, she knows as well as I do that there are many of them. One can only imagine what agony that poor old gentleman must have endured. As his inquest, the coroner ruled that he had,

“died for want of care by those charged with it”.

In the same newspaper on the same day, a journalist wrote of her treatment in an NHS hospital. She had had surgery on her back and had no complaint about that. The surgeon was excellent and the operation went well—that was all absolutely fine—but the standard of nursing care afterwards was abysmal. “On the ward”, she writes:

“I was treated like a malingering bed-blocker … When I asked for pain relief, it was refused. When I asked for help in moving, it was refused”.

One can imagine that after a back operation she had great trouble trying to move. She went on:

“When I asked for a second pillow so I could sit upright, it was refused”,

even though every other bed had two pillows. She asked for help with another extremely painful condition from which she suffered. That help, too, was refused, although by then she was hallucinating and crying from the extreme pain that she was in. I will draw a veil over the rest of her account, and report only the last words that she wrote. She said:

“what happened to me had nothing to do with money and everything to do with mindset”.

I always came to the conclusion that the previous Government believed that the excellence of care could easily be measured by the number of millions of pounds spent on the health service, a point which has been touched on in this debate. That is wrong—I repeat, wrong. It is not how much money is spent, but how that money is used which is so important. That yardstick took no cognisance of the standard of care a patient received.

Our new Health Minister promises that his Bill will focus on quality and the needs of patients, which we have wanted for years. It seems that new Ministers have watched and learnt. How pleased we were to see only yesterday that details would be made clear about how many patients have died from MRSA. I was staggered to see a report that the number was 8,000. Whether that is accurate or not, we shall soon know. Whatever is or is not done, and however many millions are spent on the health service, if the patient’s well-being is not the first priority, the service fails. That message should be framed and placed on the desk or a nearby wall of every Health Minister.