Posted on 10/06/2012 10:38:35 PM PDT by Mount Athos
Forty-three hospital patients starved to death last year and 111 died of thirst while being treated on wards, new figures disclose today.
The death toll was disclosed by the Government amid mounting concern over the dignity of patients on NHS wards.
* as well as 43 people who starved to death, 287 people were recorded by doctors as being malnourished when they died in hospitals;
* there were 558 cases where doctors recorded that a patient had died in a state of severe dehydration in hospitals;
* 78 hospital and 39 care home patients were killed by bedsores, while a further 650 people who died had their presence noted on their death certificates;
The records, from the Office for National Statistics, follow a series of scandals of care of the elderly, with doctors forced to prescribe patients with drinking water or put them on drips to make sure they do not become severely dehydrated .
"These are people's mothers, fathers, and grandparents," she said. "It is hard enough to lose a loved one, but to find out that they died because they were not adequately fed or hydrated, is a trauma no family should have to bear."
It followed spot checks by NHS regulators, which found that half of 100 hospitals were failing basic standards to treat elderly with dignity, and ensure they were properly fed.
In many wards nurses were dumping meal trays in front of patients too weak to feed themselves and then taking them away again untouched.
The investigation found patients were left hungry, unwashed or given the wrong drugs because of the "casual indifference of staff".
(Excerpt) Read more at telegraph.co.uk ...
They still have wards, as in many beds in one room?
This is how most terminally ill folks with good cardiac....pulmonary or liver go
One way or the other..
Once the hydration bag goes its days....two weeks tops
Who needs “death panels.” People need to learn how to care for their loved ones at home, so they die with dignity when the time comes. My mother and husband didn’t want to die in a hospital, so I learned how to care for them at the end. My husband was Scots ancestry and financial opinions, and he was damned if some hospital was going to eat up all his hard earned life savings. Thankfully, he had VA plus Medicare.
This is what’s coming to the US, get ready. WAKE UP AMERICA, vote Obama out. Obama care needs to go until all of congress goes on the same healthcare that we are going to be forced onto.
bump
Not everyone can be cared for at home.
In the article, one patient died following hip replacement surgery. Do you know how to do hip replacement surgery?
If I don't go out before, I will go out laughing at you liberals who thought Obamacare was a good thing. Die, friggers. I hope all you dipshits who thought it a good thing to take over the world's best medical system, go out painfully in some hospice that YOUR gov can't pay for.
Best TO your families, but have no sympathy when you can't get immediate care (think Canada/England) and you DIE waiting for an operation/transplant that used to occur everyday in the free-enterprise America.
The Brits are still so proud of their NHS that they included them in the opening of their London Olympics! Liberalism truly is a mental disease.
Private hospital rooms is really an American thing.
Not for long it isn’t. We going backward.
“Those same “death stats” coming to your parents via Obamacare.”
Not just “your parents” — it will come to ALL sooner or later.
I didn’t say everyone should, but when general failure of old age is the problem, those people can be cared for at home. My mother at 89 was dying from congestive heart failure as the pig valve implanted in her heart 10 years earlier was failing. She was too weak for another operation like that. My husband was dying from Alzheimers and the doctors said there was nothing that heroic medicine could do to fix it. On the other hand when my 90 year old father had a stroke, we did have him in the hospital and we thought we might be bringing him home, but he took a sudden turn for the worse and died in a few hours.
We just gotta have a system like that here in the United States!!!
“In many wards nurses were dumping meal trays in front of patients too weak to feed themselves and then taking them away again untouched.”
Look, this happened with my own parents in the finest hospitals in NYC. The hospitals do not have staff to feed people, maybe they should but they don’t. The family has to do this part themselves.
Here is where I gave up, my mother was admitted to one of the “best” cancer hospitals in the country (I won’t say the name here), she had cancer of the esophagus (yes, from a life of drinking and smoking, right now I’m hoping it was the hard liquor that killed her because I myself only drink beer). On her first night in the hospital what did they give her to eat? Pork chops!
I’m no foodie, nor health food fanatic, but I have to say Nutrition is THE most overlooked part of health care.
But, hey, I’ll say this at least neither of them died of dehydration. Yay!
You cannot leave your family member unattended in a hospital, you may as well just put the pillow over their face yourself.
What is happening in Britain is a disgrace, but look at what happened during that heat wave in France a few years ago - the grannys were dying while the families were all on vacation.
I’m glad you were able to care for your loved ones. I get testy about this issue because when my mother could no longer care for herself, my brother and I made the difficult decision to put her in a care facility. I had a number of meddlesome family members, neighbors and “friends” give me hell over it.
Fact is, my mother received far better care at this facility than anything my brother and I could provide. Mom wasn’t warehoused. She had a constant stream of visitors. And Mom charmed the sisters and staff. When she passed, most of them came to the wake. They loved her.
I refuse to feel guilty about our decision.
“Liberalism truly is a mental disease.”
Yes, that whole Olympics thing was a great example of liberal mental illness.
I guess the NHS doesn’t have a cure for that!
I’m glad you were able to care for your loved ones. I get testy about this issue because when my mother could no longer care for herself, my brother and I made the difficult decision to put her in a care facility. I had a number of meddlesome family members, neighbors and “friends” give me hell over it.
Fact is, my mother received far better care at this facility than anything my brother and I could provide. Mom wasn’t warehoused. She had a constant stream of visitors. And Mom charmed the sisters and staff. When she passed, most of them came to the wake. They loved her.
I refuse to feel guilty about our decision.
Please don’t guilt trip yourself over this decision. Part of why I kept my mother was that when she had been hospitalized before, she would phone me at 3 am, crying, “I’m so hungry”. So when the doctor said her condition was terminal, she begged me to care for her at home. I had to sleep sometime, so I would put a little box with a sippy cup of water and snacks next to her when she went to bed so she could eat when she woke up in the middle of the night.
FYI..The standard hospital "ward" in the UK and Australia is at least 8 to as many as 16 beds with nothing more than curtains separating the beds. Other than ICU, private rooms are not the norm. The same type of patient care problems have been happening in Australia.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.