Heartless hospital staff drafted in police to stop a distressed Fife pensioner calling to ask about her dementia sufferer husband.
In fact it was officers who helped her get up-to-date information as staff showed a ”lack of compassion” to her plight.
NHS Fife has been forced to apologise for the catalogue of failings around both the treatment of the frail 73-year-old man, who had a history of strokes, and his worried wife who was forced to leave him lying on a trolley in a corridor of the Victoria Hospital in Kirkcaldy while she returned home for her own medication.
And when the man, known only as Mr C, was discharged the following day it was not into the loving arms of his worried wife, but in a taxi while dressed only in his pyjamas and a thin housecoat in the middle of last winter’s atrocious weather.
Mrs C took the matter to ombudsman Jim Martin who said the case identified some serious shortcomings in the hospital’s care given to patients with dementia and their families.
Mr C ended up on a trolley in a corridor for nearly 15 hours after being admitted, in pain and with blurred vision, at 7.25am on January 6 2011.
He was assessed as needing to be admitted to a ward but no beds were available. The hospital was said to be experiencing particular pressures due to the weather which meant patients couldn’t be discharged and an increase in cases of the winter vomiting bug.
He became more ill and in more pain -at one point he began to hold his head and developed a pain in his arm and across his chest forcing his wife to raise her worries with staff.
He was taken to a cubicle and examined but then returned to the corridor and did not reach a bed until 10pm.
His wife had to go home for her own medication. She called the hospital a number of times to find out how he was but claimed no-one could tell her.
Staff blocked her calls. It was while Mrs C was calling the police for help that hospital staff contacted the force to ask officers to pay her a visit and ask her to stop calling.
The health board explained this was because her calls had blocked the single phone line into the department. But Mrs C said she had been ”wrongly labelled as a troublemaker”.
Acknowledging the department had been busy, an adviser to the ombudsman said the decision to disconnect Mrs C and contact the police was ”totally unreasonable and unprofessional” and provided additional distress.
Noting the board had apologised, Mr Martin considered they also needed to demonstrate improvement across the service and had made seven recommendations about respecting dignity, improving communication and understanding about patients with dementia and their families.
Chief executive of NHS Fife John Wilson said: ”We have written to the family offering our sincere apologies for the failings identified in the report. On behalf of NHS Fife I would like to publicly apologise for what went wrong in 2011.
”We accept the recommendations identified in the ombudsman’s report and have initiated work to act on the recommendations made.
”Work is already under way in relation to the implementation of Scotland’s National Dementia Strategy, with further work around communication and awareness of the role of carers. Lessons learnt will be shared across the organisation.”