Hospital neglect: ‘my father was forgotten to death’

Stanley Mack died in Selly Oak Hospital, in Birmingham, after being admitted to hospital with a suspected chest infection. He was later diagnosed with the Clostridium difficile (C-diff) bug, but died three weeks later in July 2008.

The family of the retired electrical engineer claimed his condition was not treated properly by staff who made a string of basic errors, including failing to spot that the 77-year-old was acutely ill in the days leading to his death.

After a five-year court battle with the University Hospitals Birmingham NHS Foundation Trust (UHB), of which Selly Oak Hospital is part of, a second inquest proved that he had died from dehydration. A jury said that Mr Mack had a cardiac arrest after inhaling vomit, due to inadequate nursing notes.

‘Acutely dehydrated’

Mr Mack’s widow Carol told Channel 4 News that the family had expected that her husband would receive “the very best in care”.

However, she said the quality of care suffered, adding: “There was no record that was reliable of what he was being given.

Food and drink particularly suffered. Carol Mack

“He would be given drinks and they would be left there, and occasionally they would be written up as given to him – but we knew when we were there that he was not drinking it.

“However, it was described, it wasn’t run in a way that met the patient’s needs. And of course, because of that his condition was allowed to deteriorate and particularly, for him to become acutely dehydrated.

“The legal challenges that we faced along the way were very, very considerable but we felt we just had to persist. Really to do justice to Stan’s memory. And we just didn’t want other people to have the same experience.”

The hospital trust accepted the verdict saying that “significant improvements have been made” in the intervening years since his death.

‘Forgotten to death’

Ian Mack said that his father had been forgotten: “I think in this case my dad was forgotten completely.

“It was the hospital’s job to get the basics right and very clearly they failed. They were negligent, and he was absolutely forgotten to death.”

And Channel 4 News can reveal that over the last ten years, there have been more than 9,000 deaths in hospitals and care homes where dehydration was a contributing factor, according to the Office for National Statistics (ONS).

While the overall rate has dipped marginally over the last ten years, there were still 574 deaths linked to thirst in hospitals in 2013.

Over the same time period, more than 3,000 hospital and care home patients deaths involved malnutrition as a contributing factor.

According to the ONS, the number of fatalities in hospitals, in which undernourishment played a role, has reached almost a 20-year-high with 336 fatalities in 2013.

Mr Mack said: “I think if you add up the totality of what happened in the hospital, the only word you could use is negligence.

“There was a whole range of things that should have happened – monitoring hydration and nutrition and other things – which simply didn’t happen.

“Something went very badly wrong at Selly Oak hospital. And it was absolutely right to get to the bottom of what took place.”

Selly Oak hospital was closed to patients in 2011.