To be in disbelief that this can happen on a public hospital ward?

[JackiePlace]

I'm talking about this horrific story. Surely someone saw something! My heart goes out to this poor lady's family.

www.thesun.co.uk/news/21646082/grandmother-75-bleeds-to-death/

You don't need any specific equipment monitoring particular body parts.

You just need a blood pressure cuff in place, hooked up to a machine - I had one that inflated periodically all night after my gallbladder operation 30 years ago.

It would show the loss of blood pressure that would happen if someone was bleeding to death.

It’s hard to believe that this can still be happening to vulnerable people.
I worked during my summer holidays ( 1980s ) at a Mental Home in Hertfordshire. A huge establishment, one of those old Victorian asylums.
There were patients there that had been born there. A result of staff having sex with mental patients. They had a baby unit where they were born and the babies never left. Partly to hide them I’m guessing.
One young mental patient got pregnant by one of the cleaners a few years before I started there. The cleaner hung himself in one of the rooms, he’d been attacking patients for years apparently.

@Rewind20Years it was crime watch live, one day last week I think.

@Toddlerteaplease Thank you

There have been other allegations, in that hospital, including the stroke unit:

news.sky.com/story/20-000-reward-offered-to-help-catch-killer-of-75-year-old-four-years-after-her-death-after-attack-in-blackpool-hospital-12828600

Anyone who has stayed in a hospital knows they are the least safe place.
On Maternity wards other people’s husbands and family all day and night
On a general ward, men wandering in from other wards
Hospitals are a huge awful nightmare for patients

A lot of the blood loss could have pooled in her vagina, even any which came out would have been on her bottom sheet so not noticeable unless the covers were pulled back. If it happened in the evening maybe she was left “sleeping” overnight, no reason to pull the covers back and check for blood loss.

I thought nothing could shock me about the NHS but this has.

Thanks, @mathanxiety, that's what I thought. So it looks like the victim either wasn't being monitored - straight after a massive stroke 🤔- or nobody paid attention. It reflects really badly on the hospital and, given further revelations here, on its entire culture.
How grim.

Let's not start nurse blaming here. Often stroke patients wouldn't be linked up to a monitor 24/7 which would alarm. Usually obs would be 10pm, 2am and 6am, it could have easily happened between those times. There are the bare minimum of staff on wards like a stroke unit or elderly medical unit. They are considered a 'heavy' and hard ward to work on and staffing is usually down to its bare bones overnight. All it takes is for one immobile patients to be faecally incontinent and thats 3 or 4 of them taken up turning and changing - ample time for someone to strike. Not their bloody fault in the slightest so stop with the blaming.

There's clearly one person at fault here. The perpetrator.

I remember being incredibly shocked that Jimmy Saville was able to abuse kids and adults in hospitals ,both patients and volunteers....over 60 reported instances alone(at least 1/2 were children) at Stoke Mandeville. He was provided with the relevant keys /passes/unrestricted access at some hospitals and despite various complaints, reports and challenges by various staff at different times was able to continue his attacks for many years. It certainly is the fault of the perpetrator above all else, but adequate staffing, security and safe guarding/reporting processes all play a part. We know full well the capacity of abusers to inveigle their way into positions where they can access vulnerable people so sadly when working in healthcare we do have to be aware of this.

www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-28021488

Yes, I dont think it would be unreasonable to expect the monitoring of blood pressure to be a basic element of hospital care for a stroke victim. This was done when my dad had a stroke in the 1990s (in Dublin though).

Doesn't surprise, the only true psychopaths I have come across worked in healthcare. Its easy access, just like how pedophiles become teachers and priests.

I'm not nurse blaming. Nurses are placed in an awful position in a hospital where staff are in short supply and management either doesn't have the budget for basic equipment or doesn't understand the need for it.

Nurses don't create the protocols that are followed in hospitals. They are not the people ordering basic equipment like blood pressure cuffs and the monitors they can be hooked up to.

I have relatives and friends currently working in the NHS in various roles. They are all stressed to the point of despair.

nobody in a standard ward will be hooked up to constant blood pressure monitoring and an alarm. Depending on the needs of the patient there will be a plan for how frequently their BP needs doing, which could be anything from a couple of hours to once a day! Not everyone will have a bp problem, not all strokes are caused by high BP.

It seems to me to be a basic element of patient care, @QuintanaRoo. As I mentioned, I had a BP cuff on all night following gallbladder surgery 30 years ago, and my dad had one all that time ago too, after a stroke. I'm guessing my experience in the US was the result of a lot of number crunching because my health insurance provider wouldn't have paid for the monitoring if it hadn't been shown to be cost effective.

Whether a stroke is caused by high bp or not, hypertension is often present in stroke patients, and frequent bp readings can prevent errors in treatment. The new frontier of bp monitoring by means of cuffless monitors is advancing, in recognition of the quality of information frequent bp readings can give doctors managing stroke patients both in the hospital and after discharge. Even on a purely practical level, when wards are so short staffed, it surely makes sense to have machines take over some of the things that machines are really good at? You even avoid white coat syndrome when a machine inflates the cuff and takes the readings.

Hypertension is only present in half of all stroke patients, they would have monitored her BP as frequently as her condition required it. What they couldn’t predict was internal bleeding caused by an assault unrelated to her condition. I don’t think you can blame the nurses for that.

Keeping women safe in hospitals seems to have been abandoned now.

Given the number of sexual assaults in hospitals either by male staff or male patients I would suggest an urgent review and consider not allowing any males unsupervised around the most vulnerable female patients like Valerie.

Hospital policies that allow male born trans people or male born non binary people to be placed in a female only ward if they request pay no regard to the safety or dignity of women. Reports of rapes and violent males flashing at, masturbating and terrifying female patients.

I certainly don’t think the reported efforts to recruit more male nurses/HCPs/midwives/mammogram staff in the name of ‘equality’ is at all wise.

I see. That makes sense, as I, not being medically expertise, wouldnt realise that. Thanks for explaining.

@QuintanaRoo how many BP machines do you think we have in the UK?? 30 patients per ward... so that's quite a few needed for an entire hospital to say the least! Absolutely no way the majority of patients are monitored all night unless they are in some sort of HDU/ITU area, and there is no need for it either, complete overkill.

I've spent a huge amount of time in 3 hospitals lately. Yes you have had to 'buzz' for entry but nobody has once asked me who I am, who I'm visiting etc. It would be completely easy to do pretty much anything.

That’s exactly what I’ve been saying 🤷‍♀️. That in the U.K. we don’t do it unless in icu. I’ve worked in a hospital for the last 20 years. While I totally agree we do have enough dynamaps to do it on a normal ward I’d also like to point out we don’t do it because of lack of equipment. If it needed to be done we’d have to buy more, but there’s no evidence based guideline /policy which says it’s necessary.

You can bet that if bp monitoring is routinely done in the US, it's because it's a lot more cost effective than the alternative. Cost effective means avoiding the sort of problems that can cost a lot more money than bp machines. I don't think the NHS does adequate risk benefit analysis. And clearly the money isn't there regardless, so the question is moot. There is neither enough staff nor sufficient appropriate medical equipment because of money, not because providing the equipment wouldn't be a good idea.