Medical negligence claim (false discharge & aspiration) NHS

[SorryToBotherYou28]

Hello, I was wondering if anyone could give me advice or maybe share their experience of taking action due to medical negligence (or if it's worth pursuing). I'll try to shorten the story as it's a long one...

My mother before the hospital was a very fit, very active and relatively healthy 82 year old.

It revolves around my mother, she had a very long and difficult stay in hospital, all in all 4 months, she went in with an infection and delirium with diarrhoea and extreme sickness, there was no urgency to get down to what was going on with her and she was in for 3 weeks, then suddenly she had a massive bleed and it was from an ulcer. She nearly lost her life and had to have an operation. She came through that into the ICU, but the nurses were all coughing in the ward (she was in a side room) and she caught COVID from them.

She nearly died a few times due to that, but she eventually came out of the ICU into a ward on a feeding tube.
She was assessed and put onto a soft pureed diet. She had an OK swallow, but the assessor was very worried about her being conscious. She had the lingering affects of ICU delirium and also dehydration (another thing that happened)

A nurse came in with tablets, she went to tip them into her mouth when she wasn't conscious enough, we were visiting and said she wasn't awake enough to do that, she looked at us then did it anyway. She started choking and coughing and then carried on for hours afterwards. We called in the head nurse and they said it was nothing to do with the tablets.

We visited everyday for the full 5 hours. When we went the next day she was coughing again. We asked the nurses and they said she hadn't all day before we were there. We thought we were going mad TBH. It carried on this way the next few days. We brought up the cough to the Dr who said it was long COVID, she hadn't coughed for weeks since she tested negative in the ICU (4/5 weeks).

Anyway, they discharged her suddenly on September 27th a few days later and a week after the tablets. She was discharged to a rehab centre. The next day we went to visit in the morning and an ambulance was there taking her back into hospital.
She had aspirated pneumonia and was released in a terrible condition. When she was finally placed after resus we were called in to be told essentially it was all over. She had a lung that wasn't functional and her heart was failing.

After all that we refused to leave, we stayed day and night in turns as we no longer trusted the hospital. A few times they tried to move her to palliative drugs but my daughter said they had to actually try.

She did finally get out of hospital on December 6th, she's eating normally, breathing normally and walking with a frame (which is better than expected but worse than when she went in in July).

Just wondering if there's a case in the failed discharge? We have put in an extended complaint through PALS, which was it's own thing with the governor of the hospital meeting us and asking us to maybe take a few things off the complaint and then it being a whitewash.

Thanks for any help, it's been an awful time. My daughter who has been there everyday for her nan is suffering with PTSD and we're all still trying to make sense of it all.

I guess it depends if she was already vulnerable to aspiration and what level the slt had passed her ability to swallow. Ime as she has , fortunately, recovered there won't be much mileage in a claim, especially for your daughter. Complaints are lengthy and can result in empty promises to change procedures and undertake retraining. Is there a support group for patients and families of icu survivors as that can be a helpful way to process what happened.

Sounds familiar, it very much depends upon what is in her notes, and how clear your recollections are and whether they were medically negligent.

Tbh I'm in hospital at the moment and it feels as if communication is very poor with the patient and between staff. And there's far to much chatting and general non work stuff going on and very little pro activity so you have to advocate all the time.

I'm an ex lawyer and it's a hard and stressful road to go down and one that is your mother's choice rather than yours.

I'm not really looking for anything for my daughter, just put that in as we've been struggling with it all.

It was more the discharge with pneumonia which almost killed her and set her back. They also didn't treat for it for over a week as they were denying anything had happened even when we were telling them.

The recall is excellent as my daughter keeps a journal everyday, she also has always had a freakish memory, she remembers every conversation and what she wears everywhere (she's autistic). So we have what happened each day written down as it happened.

Yes, that's it exactly, the communication is so bad and well the whole culture within the hospital.

Sadly we found similar re. communication and institutional inward-looking culture. Despite assurances to the contrary, we remain unconvinced much has really changed as the new IT system is not fully effective and still does not interface with those on the gp/community care side.

To be honest we were disgusted with the letter we received after our complaint, absolutely zero accountability or anything.

TBH the things we've seen we won't soon forget.

Regardless of he outcome, they treated her terribly and she had and the experience she had was shockingly bad.
I'm so sorry, I'd be absolutely furious if that was my beautiful Grandma.
The nurse feeding her the tablets when she wasn't ready to swallow is appalling behaviour.

It sounds still so recent, have they undertaken an investigation or just responded to your initial complaint? There should be a designated Patient Safety lead. Have they even apologised?

Thank you, yes they really did and honestly this is maybe a tenth of what happened to her as well.
The tablets is awful as we saw it, warned her not to and above slapping them out of her hand which would've got us kicked out of the hospital, there was nothing we could do but watch it happen. my daughter told me she'd just been aspirated (she's very knowledgeable) but I didn't understand what it all meant in the long run.
Then my daughter kept bringing it up to nurses and doctors when she was coughing when eating and everything and they kept dismissing her. We felt as if we were gaslit and all the while my mother couldn't advocate for herself.

The condition she was in when readmitted was shocking, she was so sick and obviously much worse than when she left the ICU.

No apology at all, actually they've always been very deliberate in language and never ever got near an apology or admittance that they did anything wrong when clearly she didn't develop pneumonia overnight when she was displaying symptoms of it for a week and clearly her chest wasn't even listened to as when the emergency dr listened right away he turned to his under doctor and shook his head head.

PALS said they would do as you said with a patient safety lead and probably a full investigation into it all as it was such a complex case that would result in some kind of sit down hearing but instead it was just responded to via email with denial of any fault.

The only thing they did admit was there was a cockroach issue as we had photos of it and they apologised and said they were sorting it out. That's it, the only admission of any guilt or apology.

That sounds really awful. You can still pursue it with PALS, say you are unhappy with the response and want further accountability.

You seem so quick to point blame at someone/anyone. “The coughing nurses” “the tablets tipped in”

What is it that you want ? An admission, money?

I'm not quick to appoint blame, did you read what happened? That's what happened, she was aspirated when we warned the nurse not to do it, they then lied to us throughout and said she wasn't even coughing over the week when we were there for 5 hours of her coughing everyday and then she was discharged out of hospital with pneumonia and she almost died as it caused her heart too much strain.

the thing I would want most is for this to have never happened.

I'm not really sure the point of your post, if you would be happy for this to happen to your loved one then that's fine but this was horrific for us all.

Also, yes, the nurses were coughing in a ward that contained only vulnerable elderly patients, she caught COVID from them (we didn't have it) and again, that almost killed her. I'm not sure I'm supposed to be happy with this kind of treatment.

I was wondering if we should. There were further things, she got the tablets for the woman in the next bed and my daughter caught it before she took them and was administered morphine when it wasn't prescribed and also we heard the nurses speaking about her and other patients in a dehumanising way and all of this happened after the long complaint.

But then it'll just be further investigation inside the hospital.

My daughter is going to complain to the health ombudsman and also has a meeting with our MP next week so is taking up the issues of the hospital with him.

The CQC might be a better route than the HO. You are usually expected to have followed through the internal complaints process first though. Do you have a copy of her notes to see what comments were made and if errors were flagged.

What might be interesting is to look back through the hospital's Board Meeting and Patient Safety committee minutes(should be published online) to see if similar issues have been raised previously. The whole system relies on complainants dropping their queries due to changing priorities, stonewalling responses or lack of information.

If you have proof and evidence about a nurse giving wrong medication, unprescribed morphine and tablets when she should have had liquids then you can report it to the departmental matron, nursing director and the nmc.

Sorry, what's HO?

I have her medical records, it got to a certain point and the people at PALS were actually quite appalled at the hospital and they said it was time to request her records so we have them, but we haven't looked at them ourselves. To be honest it's all been so traumatic it's hard right now to look at them.

We do know that she wasn't even the only readmittance in resus that day.

My daughter went into the family room (the resus unit is 8 beds max) and there was another woman talking to a friend. They ended up speaking and her mother was readmitted that day after discharge 2 days before with COVID. The ambulance driver had told her she was the third that morning. She had caught COVID in hospital too, the other woman's mother was currently on a ward with COVID she caught in the hospital.

When my daughter brought that to PALS in conversation they said you notice patterns in that job and both of those things they were noticing were patterns in the hospital at the time.

We was thinking of putting in a FOI on how many remittances there were.

Its a horrible situation, and similar to one i have been through with my own mother. But we have to stick to absolute fact, and unless you are all very very medically qualified, then unfortunately its your opinion that the tablets caused the aspiration, and its your opinion that in a hospital full of people and staff that would pass your mother everyday, it was the nurses you saw cough that gave your mum covid.

Understandable why you feel as you do, but not based on fact. There is no complaints procedure out there that would agree with you that based on your opinion of these matters the hospital was medically negligent.

Hospitals are horrible places these last few years, and can absolutely make things worse, but they do so by their very nature not at the fault of specific individuals ( concentrated levels of viral risk, reduced movement during recovery often resulting in Hospital acquired pneumonia, staffing pressures reducing communication) but we have a hospital, we have free at the point of contact healthcare, and we have a system that listens to your facts and will reply at least. Moreover, we are not having any bombed! We must understand that.

Your energy may be best directed at your mum's care moving forward, and your time together as a family during what sounds like it has been an awful time.

Good luck.

I don't think you will ever be able to prove where she caught covid , was she tested at home, on her initial admission. She was in hospital a long time and would have had contact directly or indirectly with hundreds of people. It does sound a terrible experience for you all. You have said she tested negative to covid in icu

HO Health Ombudsman

I wouldn't get too involved in other patients admissions, concentrate on your own mother only.

She was tested on admittance and it was negative. It was 3 weeks later she got COVID and they said in their reply that no nurses had gone home sick but the ward had 9 patients with COVID. She was in a private room the whole time.

Oh yeah, I have no fight there, but if they are discharging a lot of elderly patients too early it's a factor.

Nurses are expected to be in work regardless of Covid, if they don't it's 3 absences in 12 months and then a disciplinary. We have to turn in even sometimes if ill, else we wouldn't have a job.

We aren't provided with covid tests and wouldn't know if it was covid or a cold. Plus, obviously they could actually have been well and have a post viral cough, which with me can last for 2-3 weeks.

If every nurse with a cough was off work, nothing would be operational.