Hospital left ex-nurse of 93 in a ‘non designated bed space’ for six days
(...that’s what the rest of us would call a corridor)
FOR more than four decades she dedicated herself to caring for hospital patients.
Enid Stevens was even honoured with an MBE for her services to the National Health Service in 1983.
But now the 93-year-old has told if her own ‘degrading’ experience of being treated in hospital for a spine fracture’.
The widow described her six days on a trolley in a corridor – or a ‘non-designated bed space’, as hospital management called it – as like ‘a nightmare’.
And at one point she was left in urine- soaked clothes for five hours.
Mrs Stevens was treated at St James’s Hospital in Leeds – made famous by the documentary Jimmy’s, which ran from 1987 to 1998.
The great-grandmother of five, a former operating theatre nurse, was put in a bed that blocked a consultation room door, meaning she had to be moved out of the way each time a patient went in to see the doctor.
Nurses also had to lean over her to reach an apron dispenser. Mrs Stevens, who worked as a nurse for 41 years, said yesterday: ‘What happened to me was the most degrading thing I’ve ever experienced. I worked in the NHS... until I retired when I was 59 and every second of that time I was stood up on my feet – I didn’t get an MBE for nothing. But I’m not blaming the hospital or the staff there, you have to see it for yourself.
‘The place was absolutely heaving – as soon as you ask a nurse to do one thing she’s stopped by someone else to do something else.
‘There used to be convalescent homes for elderly patients to recover after hospital treatment but the govhours. ernment got rid of them years ago. It’s all in A&E and there’s nowhere to put people except in the corridor.
‘I’m just lucky I had my daughter to go backwards and forwards for everything.’
Mrs Stevens received her honour in October 1983 for her work in charge of theatre at Seacroft Hospital in Leeds. She was admitted to St James’s earlier this month, suffering from back pain. After a six-hour wait at A&E she was left in a cubicle on her own for another five She was struggling to move and had no way of alerting nurses that she needed assistance to go to the toilet, so waited helplessly for hours in soiled clothes. ‘It was the most terrible thing that has ever happened to me,’ she said. ‘I was soaked through with urine in my clothes – it was like a nightmare.
‘A nurse passed by so I asked her for some clean clothes but she never came back so I sat there for five hours wet through.’ Eventually she managed to ‘shuffle’ to the end of her trolley and into a chair to change into a clean nightdress that she had brought with her.
She was finally moved to a bed on a ward after 16 hours in A&E. She then had an MRI scan and was given morphine for her pain. It was suspected she had fractured her spine when bending over to put on her slippers.
Mrs Stevens was taken back to the ward – but three days later she was woken at 2am to be moved to a corridor because there were no beds available. She said: ‘That’s where I was left for six days.
‘I was blocking the entrance to a doctor’s consultation room so I had to be shoved out of the way when the doctors brought patients’ families in to speak with them.’
During her stay at the hospital, she was supported day and night by her daughter Barbara Brook, 61. ‘Mum was right next to where they kept the apron and mask dispensers and the staff had to lean over her to get them,’ she said. ‘It was so upsetting for her – just awful really.’
Mrs Stevens was finally discharged last Friday after spending only three days in a proper bed on a ward.
Julian Hartley, chief executive of Leeds Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust, offered ‘sincere apologies’ for the care she received.
‘Mrs Stevens was cared for in a non-designated bed space for longer than is acceptable and I am sorry that we weren’t able to move her to a dedicated bed space during her stay,’ he said. Unfortunately there are pressures across the whole health and social care system.’
‘The place was heaving’