”My mum died in pain and fear because the NHS failed her”
Julie Bailey, 57, expected mum, Bella, to be back on her feet after a short hospital stay. after appalling neglect led to her death – Julie fought back
As Mum was rushed into A&E, breathless and in pain, I was struck by a scene of absolute chaos. Nurses were running from patient to patient, shouting to make themselves heard over the noise. There was even a puddle of blood on the floor that everyone just stepped over.
“You’ll be all right now, Mum,” I tried to reassure her. But glancing around, I didn’t feel confident.
It was September 2007 and my mum Bella, 86, had been rushed into Stafford Hospital.
One minute she was making me laugh, singing along to Who Let The Dogs Out? and doing a silly dance, the next she was clutching her chest in agony. She had a hiatus hernia – not life-threatening, but it had become inflamed.
She was eventually admitted to a ward, but that was no better than A&E. Most of the patients were vulnerable elderly people and some of them had dementia. There weren’t enough staff and those who were there weren’t able to manage the patients. All you could hear were shouts of, “Nurse! Nurse!”
Every day when I visited, Mum would tell me something else that had gone badly wrong – patients not getting their medication, their food being left out of reach, confused patients wandering off or getting agitated and angry.
In the second week she was due for an endoscopy, where a camera would be put down her throat to examine the hernia. I walked into the ward that afternoon and found her slumped in a chair. I thought she was dead and screamed for help. There were no staff around, but eventually a nurse came running. “She needs oxygen!” I shouted.
They put her on a bed and drew the curtain. I could hear them trying to bring her round. It was obvious they thought she was dead. I cried when I heard her gasp and realised they’d revived her. “That’s it,” I told them.
“I’m not leaving her alone with you.” I did shifts with my daughter Laura, 18, and my niece Sammy, 37, to make sure one of us was always with Mum. I spent the nights with her, sleeping by her bed in a chair. The nurses didn’t like it, but they didn’t dare tell us to go.
real horrors
That was when we got to see the real horrors going on there. “Write that down,” said Mum, every time something happened. She had a big personality, but she wouldn’t speak up because she was scared of the nurse in charge of the ward. Everyone was – staff, patients, visitors. But we were determined to complain after Mum got out.
My notebook filled up. I found a man drinking out of a flower vase because he had no water. One confused patient went missing and was found dead in the hospital grounds five days later. One night a patient with dementia tried to drag Mum and some other women out of bed.
“I’m going to complain,” I said when I finally found a nurse.
“Don’t do that,” she begged. “We’ll get into trouble. Just wedge a chair under the door handle.” I wrote to the chief executive of Mid Staffordshire NHS Trust, Martin Yeates, about that, but my letter was ignored.
One day I popped out for five minutes and returned to find an “R” written on Mum’s chart. It stood for Refused – meaning she’d refused her medication.
“There’s no way she would have done that,” I complained and suddenly a doctor and a nurse scolded Mum. “Oh, you want your medication now?” they said, pretending she was being difficult.
Mum was on the mend and we were looking forward to her coming home. But then, while moving her, a healthcare assistant dropped her. I didn’t see it, but in struggling words Mum told me she’d hit the hard metal edge of the bed. They denied it, but I knew my mum was telling the truth.
The fall caused her heart to fail, which led to a build-up of fluid in her lungs. She was dying, but even then, some nurses didn’t care. One spitefully refused to give her medication which would have helped clear her lungs.
‘One patient was found dead five days later’
Mum died on 8 November 2007, with Laura, Sammy and me at her bedside. The cause of death was given as pneumonia and heart failure, but she essentially drowned from the fluid on her lungs. My proud, brave mum died in fear and pain. It should never have happened.
neglect and abuse
A month after Mum died, I wrote to the local paper, The Stafford Post, appealing for anyone with a similar story to come forward. Letters flooded in from families whose loved ones had also been neglected or abused at Stafford Hospital.
We held our first meeting in January
2008 at the café I ran in the town centre and announced the launch of our campaign,
Cure The NHS. Our mission was to get to the bottom of what had happened and hold people to account. Most of all, we never wanted this to happen again.
We contacted the Health Care Commission (HCC). They had concerns about mortality rates at the hospital and launched an investigation following an unannounced inspection. Their report was published in March 2009, nearly a year later and confirmed all our concerns. The hospital had harmed many patients and those who should have helped patients had neglected them.
An inquiry in February 2010 concluded that Mid Staffordshire NHS Trust, which ran the hospital, was obsessed with cost-cutting and targets. It had slashed £10 million off its budget and got rid of 150 nurses.
Inquiry chairman Sir Robert Francis said, “For many patients the most basic elements of care were neglected.”
He added, “Many [patients] were forced to rely on family members for help with feeding.”
He also reported that some patients needing pain relief got it late or not at all. Others were left unwashed for up to a month. And patients were discharged too early, quickly ending ended up back in hospital.
“The standards of hygiene were at times awful, with families forced to remove used bandages and dressings from public areas and clean toilets themselves for fear of catching infections,” he concluded, adding that patients were ignored when they said they needed the toilet and left in soiled sheeting or sitting on commodes for hours “often feeling ashamed and afraid”.
But the report didn’t go far enough – we wanted to know if similar failures were happening all over the country. At the end of 2010 we got our way and in February 2013 Sir Robert published another set of findings.
He said, “The NHS failure [in Mid Staffordshire] had extended to every level of the NHS, from the trust board to the regulators, the health authority and the Department of Health.”
He made 290 recommendations, putting patient safety at the heart of the NHS.
But all these years later, we’re no further forward. We wanted people to be held accountable for the decisions they made, but nobody was. Sadly, that’s one of the failings within the NHS. It’s always the system, not the people, with the promise that “lessons will be learned”.
We still haven’t got safe staffing levels across the whole of the NHS. We still haven’t got a safe procedure for people within the system to speak out. We have still had no change to the NHS complaints procedure.
I’d like it to be a criminal offence to silence a whistleblower. Failings in the NHS are all pushed under the carpet. There have been improvements in leadership, but not enough.
Not everyone agreed with my campaign. I was spat at in the street, threatened and my home and car were vandalised by local people who accused me of wanting to close the hospital and destroy their jobs. They even desecrated my mum’s grave.
I’ve moved away to a secret location. I gave up the café and my dog grooming business – now I’m a full-time campaigner helping people through the NHS complaints process. In 2014, I received a CBE for my campaigning, but the work goes on. Last year, Channel 4 approached me to help with a dramatisation of my story. Sian Brooke, who starred in Sherlock, plays me and Sue Johnston is my mum. I’m pleased about the programme – it’s like we can have another try. I made a promise to my mum that I would never give up, and I won’t.
The Cure is on Channel 4 at 9pm, 19 December, Julie’s book From Ward To Whitehall: The Disaster at Mid Staffs is available at curethenhs.co.uk