[BITList] Hospital neglect: 'my father was forgotten to death' -Channel 4 News

[John Feltham]

On 27 Feb 2015, at 7:12 am, HUGH <chakdara at btinternet.com> wrote:

The family talk of "legal challenges" they had to face. Both solutions to the problem of these faceless bastards start with "s" - sue and shoot.  My father was admitted to hospital for assessment - he had Parkinsons.  He lived alone and couldn't cope with the problems of opening doors and getting about - near taking a door off its hinges was one way to open it.  After assessment he ended up in a hospital cum old folks home  where he complained about it being full of old people. He quickly became institutionalised and wouldn't come out for a walk with us. Then he was always hungry and weight dropped off him. Then one evening we were delayed getting down for the evening visit - we stopped off to pay our respects to a great aunt whose husband had died. On arrival at the hospital we were taken into a side room, where an ill-at-ease male nurse told us Dad had died not long before we'd arrived. We were taken to another room where he lay, stone cold and stiff with his eyes and mouth open.  Shock can stop the brain from functioning to its full extent, so it was only later that I began to question what I'd seen. Died just before we arrived? stiff and cold? not decently laid out?  Pull the other one. There arose a very nasty schism in our family after my mother died, over what which doctor had said and to whom, so I forbore to start a discussion that would end up in a fight.  When I viewed Dad at the undertakers on the day of the funeral I didn't recognise the man in the coffin.  They'd had to break his nose to close his mouth and eyes. "Close it up," I told the undertaker, "Nobody else sees him."
 
One day much later at the Mitchell Library in Glasgow I had trouble finding my mother's death certificate - reason, she was entered as Macintyre, not McIntyre.  On a whim I checked my father's and found a death certificate different from the one I had at home.  The one at home had a time of death corresponding with what we'd been told at the hospital, died about 7.15pm, but it was a copy, and the one I was looking at was the digitised original. Dad died at 6.18am, not 7 bloody 15pm.  So he had lain in that place dead and neglected for 12 hours, and some crook had produced a fake death certificate. I took my findings to the local Registrar, who made the mistake of demanding to know what I was implying. "A %$££$%^ coverup", I told her, none too softly, whereupon she dashed away and produced the relevant registers.  "A mistake has been made," she insisted, "The typist has taken details from the certificate opposite,"  thinking me stupid. She dashed away again, taking with her my copy of the duff certificate. She returned with a fancy copy of the correct certificate, no charge, and I was left with that and my word against theirs.  My father died of starvation and general neglect - sentenced to death because he was stubborn and hard to deal with.
 
I repeat, shoot the bastards.



I agree.


ooroo



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