Woman patient calls for overhaul of health system after food bug ordeal
Frightened of food and distrustful of NHS 111 service - Bernadette Barber of Billinghay. Photo: 6118MF
A WOMAN is calling for an overhaul of the local health service after going through over four days of agony.
Bernadette Barber of Park Avenue, Billinghay wanted to highlight her ordeal of being fobbed off on the phone and then shoddily treated by hospital staff when she finally staggered in with acute food poisoning.
Mrs Barber contacted her GP when she began to feel unwell with sickness and diarrhoea and high temperature.
She was told to take Immodium but continued to call the NHS 111 non-emergency phone service for updated advice as her symptoms steadily worsened. She was eventually visited by an out of hours doctor after three days who prescribed buscopan to relieve the stomach pain.
She rang the 111 service twice more the following day, increasingly worried. By the Monday evening January 9 the medics could suggest nothing more than paracetamol finally advising her to go Accident and Emergency at Lincoln. There the staff insisted on speaking to Mrs Barber despite her husband’s protests that she was too unwell to stand at the check-in counter and she twice had to break off to rush to the public toilets.
She was put in a room but was refused a bed pan because for fear of ‘cross contamination’, until finally she had an accident having virtually lost control of her bowels. “The nurse came in with a bed pan and commode but I heard her outside the door grumbling with a cleaner,” Mrs Barber said.
She was diagnosed with campylobacter food poisoning and admitted for eight days, but questions why her condition was taken so lightly and why she was humiliated and allowed to spread infection in hospital, commenting: “While I was in hospital in isolation my room was only cleaned once because I asked when I had an accident with a bed pan. The whole system has to be changed.”
A spokesman for United Lincolnshire Hospitals NHS Trust apologised to Mrs Barber following her experience at Lincoln County Hospital, but could not discuss individual patient cases, nor could NHS Lincolnshire, which runs the 111 service although they were sorry to hear of the experience.
“We are committed to improving services and will use patient feedback to make any necessary changes to improve patient care,” said Lizzie Carroll-Thom, Urgent Care Lead.
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Thursday 24 May 2012
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