Patients like my Gail are people, not just statistics in NHS row, says widower
AHEARTBROKEN widower is calling for politicians to remember the people affected by NHS cuts, not just the statistics.
Keith Russell’s wife, Gail, died in 2016 after a near-yearlong battle with cancer and he feels staff at Southport Hospital need much more support.
The former psychiatric nurse even revealed that staff were so stretched that Gail, 51, only found out she was dying when she overheard staff members discussing her situation with each other.
Despite this, Keith, 56, had no criticism of the staff members themselves but simply felt they were being asked to do too much work with too few people.
He said: “Arriving on the ward one day I found my wife alone and in tears. She told me she had overheard nurses saying she had been referred for palliative care. This is how she found out she was dying.
“I am an ex-nurse myself and I in no way blame them for this oversight. I can fully appreciate this is the kind of mistake that occurs when staff are rushed off their feet, which clearly they were.
“We hoped my wife would be well enough to come home for Christmas. On Christmas Eve, we were told she could but needed to wait for medication from pharmacy. We sat there all afternoon and into the evening, waiting. Finally, a nurse noticed we were still there and said that pharmacy had closed hours ago and we could have left and that medicine would follow.
“It may seem like a little thing but those precious hours were truly priceless and she would have preferred to spend her last Christmas Eve at home with our daughter rather than waiting fruitlessly because nurses were too overstretched to realise.”
After suffering complications from chemotherapy during her treatment, Gail, who had one daughter called Toni, was taken to the A&E department but was left waiting for hours “emotionally terrified” until a bed could be found.
Gail, a finance manager at Christ the King High School in Birkdale for around 10 years, was eventually taken to be cared for at Queenscourt Hospice and died in March 2016, on Keith’s birthday.
At the hospice, he had been surprised to be told that she should always have two nurses helping in and out of her bed, something he had occasionally done himself at the hospital while staff were treating the large numbers of other patients.
He spoke to the Visiter after hearing politicians arguing over the state of the NHS as the winter crisis hit, hospitals reached capacity and ambulances were forced to wait hours to be able to admit patients.
Amid all the surrounding debates, he is urging those who can affect change to remember the people involved in the care, not just the data they represent.
“I feel it is important to stress that I have nothing but praise for the hard work and dedication of all who work at the hospital.
“My only wish is that, in the war of words over the future of our NHS and the adequacy of current funding levels, politicians have it in their hearts to remember, nationally, this may well be about statistics, but each statistic contains a story.
“As well as the cancelled operations; the patients forced to wait in ambulances, often for hours, before being admitted; the horrific examples of “patients dying in corridors” given to Theresa May by the 68 A&E consultants who wrote to her warning of systematic failure - I know that my wife was a statistic of the NHS crisis and I think that is a tragedy for us all.”