Great-gran left outside IT crisis hospital for hours
FAMILY CLAIMS 90-YEAR-OLD WAS ‘FREEZING’ IN BACK OF AMBULANCE
A 90-YEAR-OLD great-gran was left ‘freezing’ in the back of an ambulance for more than three hours, say her worried family.
The frail patient was rushed to Royal Oldham Hospital’s A&E department in crippling pain following a fall, and faced huge delays after reportedly being told staff could not check her in due to IT issues.
The gran-of-10’s family claim she was left on a bed in a corridor for another two hours when she was eventually brought into the ward.
Royal Oldham Hospital is among four A&E departments in the region plagued by two weeks of IT chaos, wreaking havoc with even the most basic tasks. The elderly patient had been recovering from a hip replacement when she fell and seriously injured the other side of her body.
“She was in the ambulance, sat outside A&E for three-and-a-half hours,” the woman’s son-in-law told the M.E.N.
“The nurses told her ‘we can’t book people in, we’ve got IT problems.’”
When relatives arrived at the hospital, they claim staff were unsure whether the 90-year-old woman was still in the ambulance outside.
“We said we’d have to go and bang on all the ambulances outside to find out where she was,” continued the son-inlaw. “Then another nurse came out from the back with a handwritten book and started looking through it. The nurse said ‘go through there, turn right and she’ll be in a corridor.’”
After another two-hour wait in the corridor, medics determined she would need yet another operation the next morning, according to the relatives. The ordeal has left the family shaken, they say.
“My mother-in-law was freezing in that ambulance, in a massive amount of pain,” added the worried relative.
Dr Chris Brookes, Deputy CEO and Chief Medical Officer for the Northern Care Alliance NHS Foundation Trust said: “We would like to sincerely apologise to the patient and their family whose experience fell below our usual standards.”