Scandal of elderly left to go hungry

There was a loud crash as a hospital patient’s breakfast tray went flying. Toast fell on the floor. The bowl of porridge tumbled, too — some spilling on the trousers of Dr Katz, the consultant I was then working for as a junior doctor.

After helping to clear up the mess, Dr Katz noticed the toast was hard and the porridge cold.

Addressing us staff standing around the patient’s bed, he said: ‘It’s obvious what’s wrong with Mrs hudson, isn’t it?’

In fact, it hadn’t been obvious at all. Mrs hudson had been admitted after a fall but wasn’t making much progress. But unlike Dr Katz we had missed several clues as to why Mrs hudson was so frail.

Much of being a doctor is detective work. It’s no coincidence that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle based the character of Sherlock holmes on a medical professor called Joseph Bell for whom he had worked while a junior doctor.

Mrs hudson had cataracts and arthritis. ‘She’s not getting better because she’s not eating enough,’ Dr Katz said, pointing out that she had left her breakfast to go cold.

This had happened, in turn, because she didn’t have her dentures available, her eyesight was poor and her food was out of reach. her arthritis meant she couldn’t cut it up properly anyway.

Staff hadn’t realised and her tray of uneaten food was regularly removed without question.

Mrs hudson’s case was by no means unique. Over the years I have seen numerous cases of older people in hospitals or care homes slowly starving because they aren’t being fed properly.

This week, there was an outcry when inspectors found that hospitals and care homes were feeding patients out-of-date food. But in my experience, the real issue is that too often they’re not feeding their patients at all.

research suggests that six out of ten older people are at risk of being malnourished or getting worse while in hospital. With nine out of ten nurses admitting they don’t have time to help patients eat, this is hardly surprising.

This neglect isn’t out of malice, it’s because nurses’ time is increasingly taken up with paperwork.

I suspect the current rates of malnourishment in older people in hospitals and care homes are symptomatic of how we as a society ignore older people: another case of looking without seeing.