Cancer sufferer who was put in hospital ‘cupboard’ to recover
A CANCER patient recovering from a life- saving operation has described how he ‘woke up in a cupboard’ because of a bed shortage.
Martyn Wells, 49, found himself lying in the cramped and windowless room after stomach surgery.
The father of four, who has had a string of surgeries since being diagnosed with stage four malignant melanoma, had a five-and-a-half hour operation at Birmingham’s Queen Elizabeth Hospital and spent nine days on the vascular surgery ward. But then, during the night, he was wheeled into the ‘cupboard’ while he slept.
The IT manager, who has made an official complaint, said he woke up to find himself ‘surrounded by cannulas, stoma bags, and other accessories’. The hospital said the ‘cupboard’ was in fact one of its ‘consultation rooms’, which it described as a ‘fully equipped clinical area’.
But Mr Wells, from Worcester, has sent Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt a picture of the ‘cupboard’ and invited him to a meeting in it to discuss why it is ‘wrong’ to use such rooms to treat patients.
He said he was regularly interrupted by staff entering the room to fetch equipment, and had to walk 60 yards to the toilet while attached to a drip. When he complained to a nurse, Mr Wells was told the room was classed as a ‘clinical decisioning space’ and a bed shortage was to blame.
He said: ‘For me, this whole incident encapsulates the issues that we have in the NHS today. What on earth is the logic of putting a stage four cancer patient in a broom cupboard? I don’t understand it.
‘The night before, I was told that I might have to be moved from my side ward, because I was waiting for discharge and there were other patients.
‘I told them I’d rather not be moved, as I was on a drip and had just taken a laxative, and didn’t want to be embarrassed by being moved too far away from a toilet.
‘At some point during the night, I must have been moved in there. I woke up in the morning, and was completely disorientated. They claimed that it was a “clinical decisioning space”, but that just seemed to be an attempt to justify putting me in a cupboard. It’s jargon.’
Mr Wells also said it could have been fatal if he had gone into cardiac arrest, because ‘no one would have got to me in time’.
He added: ‘I almost feel guilty for complaining, because the surgeons that operated on me saved my life.
‘But there must be something very wrong with the system if this is what’s happening to ill people like me.’
The University Hospitals Birmingham NHS Foundation said: ‘When a ward reaches maximum capacity a patient who is clinically fit for discharge may be moved into a consultation room to allow another patient with clinical needs to be transferred on to the appropriate ward.’