Escape from hospital

SIR – Ted Clarkson (Letters, October 21) wrote of his father being delayed in getting home from hospital to die.

I ordered an ambulance and charged the hospital for the cost to get my dying wife into a nursing home in defiance of faceless bodies who delayed her discharge.

I was a one-time chairman of the health authority in question. They knew I knew why there was a delay. Consequently I simply took my wife to the nursing home I had chosen, with familiar things about her, and me with a room beside her.

She died the next morning, in the arms of her loved ones. Frank Stewart

Poole, Dorset