Diary of despair of pensioner who died in 'zoo' hospital after 'catalogue of blunders by staff'

A horrifying journal of the neglect a great-grandmother suffered in hospital has been published by her family.

Betty Dunn, 79, was admitted with a routine stomach problem but died six weeks later after a string of medical errors.

During this time her relatives compiled the diary detailing her ordeal in a ward they grimly nicknamed the 'zoo'.

The dossier tells how Mrs Dunn was:
Given medication containing penicillin - despite warnings that she was allergic to it;

Forced to sleep on a bare mattress;

Made to wait 40 minutes for a bedpan;

Treated by staff who could barely speak English;

Made to eat a food substitute against medical advice.

At one stage, the mother- of-four's children became so desperate that they called the police for help but were told nothing could be done.

In a final insult, the news that Mrs Dunn was dying was broken to her daughters in a busy corridor in front of other visitors.

The wartime Land Girl was being treated on a mixed-sex ward divided into bays at Tameside Hospital, in Ashton-under-Lyne, near Manchester. Labour had pledged to scrap this type of patient accommodation in 'The ward where mum was treated was like a zoo, and we called it that afterwards,' said her daughter, Liz Degnen, 49, today.

'It was manic and chaotic with people running around like headless chickens.'We could see there were other patients not being cared for. We tried to communicate with the staff but some of them couldn't even speak English'

'It doesn't matter if you're 79, 29, or 109, the way the hospital treated her was disgraceful. Every aspect of her care was just terrible. The staff did their best but there were not enough of them to cope. It's a scandal that hospitals can operate like this in this day and age.'

Mrs Dunn, a former dinner lady from Gamesley, near Glossop in Derbyshire, was admitted to Tameside on January 4 with complications from a stomach bug.

'On the night she was admitted for treatment mum was waving and blowing kisses and saying "See you, love",' said Mrs Degnen, a teaching assistant.

'Yet when we left for a few hours we came back to find herslumped across a bedside trolley. Her eyes were at the back of her head, rolling about.'

Her children responded by keeping a round-the- clock vigil and documenting the care she was given.



They noted that one nurse even refused to change a faulty drip because she was about to go off duty.

A few days later came the mix-up over the penicillin. 'At this point we were in tears,' one of the sisters wrote in the diary.

'Mum had yet again missed another dose, this was the final straw.' Mrs Degnen said yesterday: 'We didn't feel like they were listening to us. They were making blunder after blunder in our face.

'We could see there were other patients not being cared for. We tried to communicate with the staff but some of them couldn't even speak English'

Mrs Dunn's condition appeared to stabilise but on January 21 her family were told she had contracted C. diff.continues here

And don’t they tell us that the NHS would collapse without them, that on this issue at least nationalism is wrong, yet this is not the first case and in my own personal life I know of another “Sprightly” pensioner dying in similar circumstance ,such sorrow it caused and will forever do. These proud people forced to seek help through age and illness, this generation that “made do”, that “got on with things”, that survived that unnecessary war only to die so appallingly. Not for them though, not for the politicians, not for the elites, no, only for us, we the playthings of so many forces.

Its understandable of course, place so many disparate people within a given landmass and disease is the result, already a work-colleague is at home with “swine flu”, whilst another nurses her eight year-old son through it ,here the outbreak spreads unstoppably again no-one cares. I write this prior to work, rushed, yet upon leaving my house I place myself at risk of this disease and indeed others, can they not see just what they do to us, can they not, this is no fun experiment now, this is an attack upon the indigenous peoples and I pray that one day justice will be served.

We never asked for this, this experiment, everything known advises against such a policy and still they persist ,what is it they hate so much, what did we ever do, do be so attacked, denied our birthright and in some case our health. When one considers all of the medical advances, the so-called modernity of medicine, then why are they killing us, why are they treating us so bad and when will it stop. Immigration permits the spread of disease, it allows it entrance and places we all at risk, borders are there for a reason, that is their invent, why it is modern so-called politicians, go against traditional human culture, one can only guess. However, financial reward, office and ideology can be the only reason and on that basis it is akin to physical attack, to knowingly place others at risk, we must be mad to permit this.

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