When I recently visited my mother in Basildon & Thurrock Hospital Trust: I thought welcome to the 19th Century Mum.

The media has been full of stories about a damming report issued by the Care Quality Commission (CQC) into Basildon and Thurrock University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust. The CQC officials entered the hospital on the 8th of October of last year and carried out an unannounced inspection. According to the report their inspectors stumbled across a catalogue of dirt, poor clinical practices, mould growing in medical suction machines and out-of-date medical equipment.

I have a personal interest here as my 83 year old mother was recently an in patient in this hospital, and it seems there has been few if any improvements in patient care between the time when the CQC inspectors visited the hospital last October and when my mother arrived on the 30th October of this year.

She had been sent by her GP to the Assessment Ward at Basildon and Thurrock Hospital, as the GP felt my mother was in need of a course of intravenous antibiotics due to a badly infected left leg. At first I thought fine, we will not have to spend up to four hours plus waiting to be seen in the casualty department; presuming, due to her age and her GP’s assessment she would be warded almost immediately. 

We arrived at Basildon and Thurrock hospital's Assessment Ward at approximately 6:30pm, we signed in with the ward clerk who then told us told to sit down in a small corner of the ward. When I noticed the waiting area was almost entirely full of OAP’s waiting to be assessed the warning bells began to ring, as I could not help wondering whether sending the aged here was a ruse to keep causality waiting time down.

She waited for over four hours before she was seen by a nurse, which in the scheme of things was ‘quick,’ as a 93 year old man who had brought in his wife who was suffering from leg ulcers and Alzheimer's disease, told me they had been waiting to be seen for nine hours and others waiting told me a similar tale. 

It was well past midnight before Mum was finally seen by a doctor, who told her she would have to come into the hospital for an intravenous course of antibiotics. Something she had already been told by her GP over seven hours previously, although her GP also said once the treatment was authorized by a Trust consultant, she could see no reason why the course of antibiotics could not then be overseen at home by the Trusts home nursing team. 

If you consider my mother is 83 years and suffering from a badly infected leg, the fact the waiting area was totally inadequate due to the numbers of patient's using it, hardly helped matters, nor did the inadequate number of chairs to sit on, and the lack of information we received as to why there was such a long wait.

Nevertheless, we might have put the aforementioned down to experience and hoped in the future other elderly patients might not be treated in such a callous manner. However when she arrived on the 'ward,' her situation went from bad to worse. If I were to describe where she was placed as an 'overnight stay hospital ward' it would be a lie and a total distortion of the truth. It was a corner of the Cardiac Day Unit on level B, situated next to the kitchens in the bowels of the hospital. There were none of the most basic amenities one expects in a hospital ward, such as adequate toilet facilities, throughout my mothers stay there were upwards of ten bedridden patients on this 'Unit,' yet there were only one toilet available for them to use, no showers or even proper washing facilities, just a small hand basin. Let alone lockers, over bed lights, TV, telephone, day room, etc, one expects in a modern hospital. Now, if this was just a case of an overnight stop-over, necessary due to an unforeseen emergency, we as a family at a push would have lived with my Mums situation.

But this was not the case, for no matter how much we complained, she remained housed in this totally inadequate and unsanitary facility for five days.  Throughout this period all but one of the ladies along side her on the 'Unit' were elderly, two were clearly suffering from a serious dementia type illness and also suffered from incontinence, which resulted in the other women on the 'Unit' getting very little sleep and due to the lack of showers, left one of the women in a shameful and pitiful condition. There're situation was hardly helped by the 'unit' having only one Zimmer frame available. It is not an exaggeration to say some of the patients appeared to be at the end of their tether. One said to me one afternoon “I cried with rage last night, both for my own predicament and the way the lady in the next bed was being treated.”(she meant not being treated) 

On the morning of her fourth day in this subterranean hell hole my mother was told by her consultant she could finally go home that day and be treated at home by the district nurse with antibiotics, why this had not been arranged earlier the doctor could not, or would not say.  My mother telephoned me on her mobile to ask me to come and collect her, she then got dressed and waited for the appropriate paper work to be dealt with.

When I arrived at the hospital later that afternoon, she was sitting on the side of her bed dejected and told me she has now been told she cannot go home.  I asked the doctor, who luckily just happened to be on the 'Unit' when I arrived, when I could take my mother home, he and a nurse had a conversation as if I did not exist, then the doctor told me in no uncertain terms, “she cannot go home, and no one has told her she can.” 

My mother was then asked by the doctor, "Who had told her she could go home," she went over clearly and precisely what she had been told by the senior doctor who had earlier that day told her she could go home. (At the time I did not know her consultants name as unlike in a regular ward the name of her consultant was not chalked on the board at the head of her bed.) Nevertheless my mum remembered it and informed both the doctor on duty and the aforementioned nurse.

She was then told by both the nurse and doctor this was simply untrue, she must be mistaken and a great deal of eye rolling in my direction went on, which I took to mean these two medics were implying my mother was partially senile; which thankfully she certainly is not, she lives independently and still works for a number of charities. I have to say it was shameful and shocking behavior on the part of two medical professionals. After I ‘firmly’ challenged the doctor, he said he would search out his "boss" within the next 15 minutes and come back to me. 

Instead of doing what he had promised he later telephoned the sister on the 'unit' and told her he had been told by his senior my mother could not go home. We accepted this, although I had doubts about whether the junior doctor was telling the truth about having consulted his 'boss.' Nevertheless, we had no alternative as when I asked the sister what would happen if I took my mother home, she replied that it would be the end of her treatment. As my mother clearly could not go home unless we were confident the home nursing was in place, she reluctantly agreed to stay, however you can imagine her disappointment.

The following morning after a family member had gone through back channels at Basildon and Thurrock hospital, my mother received a visit from her consultant who apologised profusely for the mix up of the previous afternoon; and confirmed she had been right in what she claimed about going home, and the procedures necessary for her to go home were being put in place as they speak. 

My mother was very grateful for this apology as when you are 83 years old; and medical staff refuse to believe what you are telling them, the first human instinct is one of fear and if her experience the previous day is anything to go by, old folk are right to be fearful of medical professionals making ill judged subjective decisions that impact upon them detrimentally. 

Whilst we waited for her discharge letter, and medications, all the shortcomings of this 'unit' once again came to the surface, first no envelopes on the unit in which to place the discharge letter to her GP. Next no syringes and needles on the 'unit' for the use of the home nurses who are to visit my mother at home daily to set up her antibiotic drip, etc. (This may seem trivial, but if a patient had had an emergency in the night and needed an immediate injection, the nursing staff would first have to go in search of syringes elsewhere.)

Finally no wheel chair available to help my mother make her way to the car park. After a nurse went off to search of one and came back empty handed, I was forced tour the hospital in search of a wheelchair. Finally I managed to snatch/steal a wheelchair unseen from a ward and I have no doubt by doing so depriving some other poor soul of their mobility.

Thankfully my mother is now back in her own home and whilst it has not been all plain sailing her leg is slowly improving and she is grateful to the nurses who come in to treat her daily.

I have made a complaint to the hospital Trust but we are still waiting to hear its outcome, by making this complaint we have no wish to make anyone walk over hot coals, nor do I wish to see anyone disciplined who is involved in frontline services at the hospital. Not least because the problems which evolved during my mothers stay seem to me to be mainly organizational matters. For example what fool would place up-wards of eleven elderly bed ridden in-patient's on a unit with one toilet and no showers, lockers etc. For a very short stay in an emergency,  maybe, but five nights? 

I also believe the way 'Blue Labour' has filled health service Trust's with political gofers and business cronies is having an extremely destructive role. In my area few of these oversight trust board members live in either Basildon or Thurrock, preferring the more leafy parts of Essex. They have a mentality of can do, or in stupid speak overcoming challenges. Which may be all very well in business, if say the alternative is the company going bust. But the NHS should be different, it should not be run along these lines, but as a service that ebbs and flows to the needs of the communities it serves. It is members of these communities who should sit on the Trusts governing board, not those who have caught a ministers eye.

It also became clear to me Basildon and Thurrock Hospital Trust uses far to many temporary agency nurses, which has resulted in a downward spiralling of morale amongst its own nursing staff and has been detrimental to patient care. During the five days of my mothers stay on this 'Unit,' there was absolutely no continuity of nursing staff. Ward Sisters were co-opted daily from other wards, although shanghaied might be a more appropriate term. As they clearly resented being taken off their normal wards, not least because it meant them working with agency nurses with whom they had no rapport and whose commitment to the patients and the hospital Trust they often questioned and understandably so. 

Although the problem today is much wider than internal organisational matters alone, or the fact neither the political gofers or the business people who sit on the governing Trust will say no and speak the truth to government. The fact is due to unchecked house building and population growth, Basildon and Thurrock Hospital Trust is unable to serve adequately a catchment area that over the last ten years has seen a population growth unseen since the decades which followed WW2. 

Far from central government getting to grips with this problem and channeling both industry, commerce and new comers to the UK away from the South East of England. They are hell bent on building more housing units and encouraging business to move eastwards along the Thames corridor under the Thames Gateway project. The infrastructure along the Thames rim, whether it be roads, schools or health care is already over stretched and near breaking point, but this mad rush for growth in the South-east continues.

Finally I feel it is important I make a brief observation of something else my mother and I witnessed on more than one occasion during the five days of my mother stay at Basildon and Thurrock hospital. We both felt there was a nasty undertow of racism amongst some of the staff at the hospital, I drew this admittedly surface conclusion from exchanges I personally witnessed; and in one case a fully fledged argument. I reported this in an exchange of emails when making my complaint to the Trust on my mothers behalf, but I refused to take it further for two reasons, firstly one of natural justice, as what I had witnessed could only be a surface impression, but just as important as this, I sensed were I to add this to my mothers complaint it would be brought to the fore and her main complaints would possibly become secondary. 

More here.