Ageing patients need compassion and assurance from hospitals.
All too often, they are treated with indifference
Henry Porter Sunday December 2, 2007 The Observer
An elderly man is taken by ambulance to the Worcester Royal Hospital on Sunday evening. His wife suspects that the pains on the left side of his chest are caused by pneumonia, which he has contracted four times previously. After running a test on his heart, the ambulance paramedics agree that it looks serious. On arrival at the accident and emergency department, he is given an X-ray. But then nothing much happens.
It is late. He is told there are no beds available. He is moved to a cubicle with a door. In the early hours, the door is shut, perhaps to allow him to get some rest. At any rate, he becomes worried and wonders whether he has been forgotten. He summons the breath to shout for attention. As he remembers it, he was there for several hours before a nurse came, but we cannot be absolutely sure because he was ill and his sense of time may have been distorted.
In the morning, A&E staff ask him to phone his wife to come and take him home. As it happens, she is already on the way to visit him. She arrives and is very surprised to see him dressed because he looks a good deal worse than the evening before. He has some antibiotics with him and has been told that his pneumonia is a 'borderline case'.
Through the day spent at home, his condition worsens. What to do? Phone the ambulance again and hope the hospital has the wit to admit him and provide proper treatment or try another route? His children are away - one in Romania, the other in Edinburgh - but his daughter-in-law organises a private ambulance to collect him from Worcestershire and take him to London, where a private room has been found.
His condition has worsened considerably by the time he arrives in the early hours of Tuesday morning. It looks touch and go. He is transferred to an intensive therapy unit at another private hospital, where he receives superb levels of care. On Wednesday, he begins to turn the corner. By Sunday, though still quite weak, he is well enough to be driven home.
I know all this to be true because the patient in the story is my father and it was my mother who moved heaven and earth to find him treatment in London.
The much bigger question in all this is the way we treat old people in hospital. My father was insured and he had a family to fight for him, but the vast majority of old people are lacking either or both of those factors. Someone less fortunate may not have survived the casualness of these episodes - for there is much evidence to suggest that the health and lives of old people matter a lot less than those of young people.
A study of 23 hospitals published by the Healthcare Commission last September found that only five complied with government standards of caring for old people, although all 23 declared that they had. Clearly NHS workers are able to deceive themselves on the failure of basic care and respect.
There is only one conclusion. What we are seeing in the NHS attitude reflects a common view that as people age, they fade from our concern. Six weeks ago, in the light of reports about the unhappiness of British children, I wrote that 'a society that fails its children is almost worthless'. The same applies to a society that fails the elderly. What is worrying is that these two symptoms of thoughtlessness may in fact be part of the same condition: a decline in the values and compassion of at least two postwar generations.
Abridged Article: Source - The Observer
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