Bed-bound pensioner waiting 2 years for op
A DISABLED grandad has been left waiting two years for an operation on a sore which leaves him bed-bound for most of the day.
Danny Sullivan says he has no idea when he will finally be called forward for the long-awaited surgery.
The 75-year-old, from Kings Heath, says the sore has severely impacted his quality of life and means he has to stay in bed for up to 18 hours a day to ensure it doesn’t get worse.
Mr Sullivan is paralysed from the waist down after he was injured in a car crash and uses a wheelchair.
He says he feels like it is “a total waste of a life at the moment” and that a date for surgery would at least give him “something to cling onto”.
His operation was originally scheduled for April 2020 but had to be cancelled as frontline NHS staff battled surging Covid cases. But more than two years later the fed-up grandad is still waiting.
District nurses visit him at his ground-floor flat – where he lives alone – every day to change his dressings as he continues to wait for treatment at Birmingham’s Queen Elizabeth Hospital.
The father-of-three says he sees “no light at the end of the tunnel” and, while understanding others need care more urgently than him, admits the long delay has left him feeling hopeless.
The NHS trust which runs the hospital has apologised to patients who have been kept waiting for treatment and says it is doing everything it can to tackle the treatment backlog.
Mr Sullivan said: “I had the pre-op. Then three days before the op I had an email to say it had been cancelled. That was virtually at the start of Covid and I’ve been waiting ever since.
“Every day the district nurses come and they dress it. I spend 16-18 hours in bed to stay off the wound otherwise it would get worse, which is a nuisance. It’s changed my life, certainly.
“One of the drawbacks to being a paraplegic is you’re sitting all the time so you’re prone to pressure sores.
He added: “The only people I see most days are the district nurses but I see my son and grandchildren about once a week.”
And the grandad fears he could be waiting for a while longer yet before he is finally called forward for surgery.
He said: “I have my next appointment with my consultant surgeon in November, which doesn’t inspire me with a lot of confidence.
“I ring his secretary about once every six months and I get the same answer. The priority is cancer patients, obviously, heart patients, emergency surgery.” University Hospitals Birmingham NHS Trust, which runs the QE, said: “We are sorry that we have to cancel or reschedule any procedure as a result of the demands on our services.
“These demands have never been higher. The impact of Covid on our capacity, both in terms of patients needing care, or staff unavailable due to isolation, was felt very significantly during the first months of the year during this most recent wave of the virus.
“We are working very hard to care for patients given these sustained pressures, by creating extra ward and surgical capacity on all our hospital sites, recruiting additional staff, and introducing new treatment routes, to help us get back on track.”
Three days before the op I had an email to say it had been cancelled. That was virtually at the start of Covid and I’ve been waiting ever since.