An old friend was given bad news by his GP two years ago: he was exhibiting symptoms consistent with bowel cancer and therefore needed immediate treatment by a specialist.
The friend, a retired man in his 60s whom I have known since childhood (and who has asked me to call him Roger so as to protect his identity), duly received an ‘urgent referral’ to visit consultants at Nevill Hall Hospital in Abergavenny, a market town in Monmouthshire, South Wales, near to where we both live.
Bowel cancer is a grim and life-threatening disease that kills 16,000 people in Britain each year. But if treated early, chances of survival are relatively high. More than 93 per cent of patients diagnosed in its earliest stage remain alive five years later. For those diagnosed later, however, the figure falls to 77 and then 48 per cent. Very late diagnosis means a survival rate of just 6 per cent.
Ed Miliband says only Labour - under him as prime minister - can be ‘trusted’ to safeguard the British NHS
With this in mind, it seemed reasonable to expect the Welsh NHS to pull out every stop to secure Roger the ‘urgent’ appointment that his GP had recommended.
Yet it wasn’t to be.
Instead, he was forced to wait four months to see a consultant.
Though the presence of a tumour was swiftly confirmed, Roger was then told he’d have to wait three months before he could be operated on.
So far, so awful. But that delay, resulting in surgery taking place only in January last year, was just the start of it.
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Two days after the operation, when Roger was recovering in the hospital, a bedside drip feeding intravenous painkillers into his bloodstream ran dry and he immediately began to experience intense pain.
‘It was the worst pain you can imagine,’ he says. ‘But despite my screams, it took staff two-and-a-half hours to locate a doctor to come and sort out the drip.’
By that stage, Roger was in such agony that he had begun vomiting - with some of the vomit entering recently stitched wounds on his abdomen. Those wounds were then not properly cleaned. Within 48 hours he had contracted MRSA.
Though he was given strong antibiotics to combat this potentially life-threatening condition, this led to C.difficile, a severe bowel infection that kills 1,600 people in Britain each year.
Lillian Williams, 82, died aged 82 in the Princess of Wales hospital in Bridgend - just weeks after this picture was taken consultants were telling her family she had no
It took three weeks for Roger to recover sufficiently to leave hospital. And it was another two months before he was strong enough to leave home unaided.
Only then, almost a year after his initial visit to the GP, was he finally able to begin the supposedly urgent course of chemotherapy that will hopefully combat his cancer. The treatment continues to this day.
Today, he says: ‘It’s only afterwards, when you have time to reflect, that you realise what a botched job it was and how they could have killed you.’
To a layman, his unedifying experience at the hands of the Welsh medical system perhaps sounds a rare example of bad practice.
But to those of us who live in the Principality, dreadful stories such as Roger’s have become depressingly routine.
It is hard to find anyone who doesn’t know a horror story about their woeful health service
In fact, it is hard to find anyone who doesn’t know a horror story about their woeful health service.
Indeed, a report by the British Medical Association (BMA) last month said that institutional mismanagement has left the system facing ‘imminent meltdown’.
The association was so shocked that it has joined campaigners, MPs and a raft of healthcare experts in calling for an immediate full-scale independent inquiry into all aspects of the Welsh NHS. For people such as Roger, it can’t come too soon.
Indeed, another acquaintance also contracted MRSA at Nevill Hall. A couple of years ago, Pam, a stalwart of my local tennis club, underwent a routine hip operation only to pick up a virulent strain of the infection. She subsequently died.
Other patients, too, have been forced to wait months for vital cancer treatment.
Around half of Welsh cancer sufferers must wait six weeks or more for many scans and tests. Yet, across the border in England, less than a mile from my home town of Monmouth, the comparable figure is less than 6 per cent.
Little wonder that 15,000 Welsh patients every year decide to travel to English hospitals for cancer treatment they are denied at home.
Or that thousands more are going private or even moving to rented accommodation in England to bypass long waiting lists for heart scans or hip operations.
Thomas McDonald, who died in 2009, aged 84, (pictured with wife Thelma) after it was claimed he was ‘starved’ during an extended stay in hospital following complications from a chest infection
Over the coming days, this series about the Welsh NHS will tell the stories of patients who have been failed by the service and it will expose the shocking extent of the crisis - one that shames the Labour politicians who control the health service in Wales.
Their testimonies detail a system in turmoil, where dreadful oversights in care, institutional neglect and instances of botched treatment have become routine.
They also lay bare a woefully politicised culture of official cover-ups, where it has become common practice to smear critics and gag whistle-blowers. As well as the BMA’s damning assessment, there have been several other highly critical reports, from highly regarded bodies such as the Royal College of Surgeons and the College of Emergency Medicine (who warned last year, incidentally, that Wales’s A&E departments were ‘at the point of meltdown’).
It has become common practice to smear critics and gag whistle-blowers
Official figures, too, show the Welsh NHS lagging behind England’s on a host of key indicators, most notably waiting times, and reveal that the Welsh Government has until recently been cutting NHS funding by 1 per cent a year, even as the rest of Britain increases it by the same amount.
Typically, the Welsh Government refuses to acknowledge the crisis and dismisses its critics irresponsibly as purveyors of Right-wing propaganda. But what else can you expect from what is effectively a one-party state?
For ever since devolution in 1999, when responsibility for health- care was given to the Welsh Assembly, voters in the Principality have elected only Labour administrations (albeit never with an overall majority).
As a result, the Welsh NHS has been controlled, without exception, by the Labour Party for 15 years. Its supporters also dominate every regional Health Board.
Despite these gross failings, Ed Miliband says that only Labour - under him as prime minister - can be ‘trusted’ to safeguard the British health service.
Indeed, the Labour leader recently praised his Welsh colleagues for ‘charting a course for the next Labour government’ and, last year, said laughably that they were doing an ‘excellent job’ of running the Welsh NHS.
Try convincing the family of Lilian Williams of the truth of that. For the 82-year-old died at the Princess of Wales Hospital in Bridgend in 2012 a few days after being admitted with a chest infection.
Malcolm Green, 82, a businessman, died at Withybush Hospital in Haverfordwest in 2012 after waiting five hours to be operated on while he was bleeding internally
She died after a catalogue of official blunders over four hospital stays: she was unnecessarily sedated; she was not given the correct drugs; she was left starving and parched because of unnecessary ‘nil by mouth’ orders; and in agony because her prosthetic leg was not removed at night.
At first, her son Gareth was told his mother had died from pneumonia. But he wasn’t happy and asked for a post-mortem, which revealed that she had died from a heart complication. Subsequently, he discovered evidence that nurses had made up readings of her blood sugar levels and blood pressure, and falsified records to suggest she had taken medication when she hadn’t.
Her son complained to the Abertawe Bro Morgannwg University (ABMU) health board, which runs the hospital, but, he says, encountered a ‘confrontational’ response.
He then decided to write to senior Labour politicians urging them to look at ‘deliberate deceits and cover-ups’, but claims to have been largely ignored.
After police launched an investigation into his mother’s care leading up to her death, five hospital workers were arrested and charged with willful neglect.
Consider, also, the case of Colin Davies, who died at the same hospital. The 70-year-old diabetic’s family were told that the police believe he was neglected by nursing staff. Two people have since been charged in relation to his death.
Allan King died at the same hospital after a botched bowel operation in 2011. A subsequent report by the Public Services Ombudsman found that the surgery was ‘too risky’ and should never have been carried out. It concluded also that hospital staff gave misleading evidence about his treatment. Hid the fact he had suffered serious complications during the procedure.
Ed Miliband recently praised his Welsh colleagues for ‘charting a course for the next Labour government’
Allan’s former partner, Dorothy, who was awarded £5,000 in compensation, says: ‘The health board and their staff repeatedly lied to try to cover up their mistakes. It is like the Mafia. It has been a whitewash with a cover-up from beginning to end.’
At least two other patients are at the centre of claims that their records were falsified after their death.
One is Thomas McDonald, who died in 2009, aged 84, after it was claimed he was ‘starved’ during an extended stay in hospital following complications from a chest infection which saw him drop from 13 stone to 8 stone. An investigation by the police and social services found his medical charts had been incorrectly filled out and ordered the health board to apologise.
Meanwhile, an independent report commissioned by his family found his care ‘fell well below the accepted standard’. His daughter Irene said she had found him lying in a heavily soiled bed after staff failed to take him to the toilet. ‘It was just humiliating for him.’
Almost invariably, the whistle- blowers and aggrieved families of victims of the Welsh NHS find themselves facing a mixture of attacks and obfuscation.
For example, the children of Malcolm Green, a businessman who died at Withybush Hospital in Haverfordwest in 2012 after waiting five hours to be operated on while he was bleeding internally, have been refused access to a report detailing his final hours.
Despite learning that staff lied about his treatment and that a consultant chose to attend a meeting rather than operate immediately on the 82-year-old patient, they have yet to receive a proper apology.
A supposedly contrite letter from Trevor Purt, chief executive of the local Hywel Dda health board, had not even been signed by the health boss. When they tried to contact the Welsh Health Minister, Mark Drakeford, they were told to complain via a website.
Malcolm’s son John says: ‘The complaints process is deliberately fitted with barriers to stop people pursuing complaints and to make them give up. In the Welsh NHS, there is a disgraceful culture to try to cover up complaints.’
Thankfully, there are those such as Labour MP Ann Clwyd who are prepared to speak out. She has suffered personally - her husband Owen, she says, died ‘like a battery hen’ after being kept on a trolley in a corridor at the University Hospital of Wales in Cardiff.
Her reward for highlighting an issue of grave public concern? She has been smeared by the Welsh ruling class.
Though the hospital’s health board apologised ‘unreservedly’ about her husband’s care and said his treatment was ‘unacceptable’, Mrs Clwyd was publicly told to shut up and stop complaining by Labour Assembly member Lynne Neagle.
‘We have all had cases of problems with poor care, but I do not believe that it gives Ann Clwyd the right to denigrate the entire Welsh NHS and I wish that she would stop it,’ Miss Neagle remarked. Miss Neagle’s attitude speaks volumes for the sense of entitlement. Inscrutability that has been allowed to take root in a health service that many believe puts point-scoring over patient care.
Things are very different in England, where health boards (often run by party political apparatchiks) were replaced many years ago by trusts in an attempt to get a degree of independence from Whitehall.
Though their performance varies, they are designed to be protected from party politics and are typically run by an eclectic mixture of local people, business leaders, medical staff and NHS employees.
Official figures show Welsh NHS is lagging behind England on a host of key indicators - most notably waiting times - and until recently reveal the Welsh Government has been cutting NHS funding by 1 per cent a year
In Wales, by contrast, the NHS is still governed according to a post-war structure: with seven separate regional health boards, each dominated by Labour supporters.
The under-fire ABMU, for example, has as its chairman Andrew Davies, a former Labour Assembly Member. The Aneurin Bevan University Health Board, which has responsibility for Nevill Hall, is chaired by David Jenkins, a former general secretary of the Welsh Trades Union Congress.
And Cardiff and Vale University Health Board, which so failed Ann Clwyd’s husband, is chaired by Maria Battle, a former Labour parliamentary candidate. Given the background of these people, it’s hardly surprising to find widespread evidence of the Welsh NHS prioritising an old-Labour political agenda over the task of improving patient care.
In England, to cite a couple of examples, patients are often encouraged to travel to a different region for hospital treatment if waiting lists are shorter there. And many routine procedures, such as hip operations, are carried out for the NHS by private doctors.
To the Labour Taffia in Wales, by contrast, any whiff of ‘privatisation’ is anathema.
Shopping around for hospital treatment in a different region is frowned upon because it smacks of competition. Under old Labour dogma, you get what you are given.
The health board and their staff repeatedly lied to try to cover up their mistakes. It is like the Mafia. It has been a whitewash with a cover-up from beginning to end
Dorothy King, whose husband died after a botched operation
In England, to cite a third example, the NHS has created a £200 million-a-year Cancer Drugs Fund to help patients seek out experimental, but expensive, drug treatments such as the life-saving Avastin. Yet in Wales, Avastin is not routinely available on the NHS. And the Cardiff government stubbornly refuses to set up its own Cancer Drugs Fund because it might ‘enrich’ drug companies.
At the heart of this crisis, though, is the issue of money. For like other socialist administrations across Europe, the Welsh Government has in recent years found itself running out of taxpayers’ cash to spend.
While real-terms spending on healthcare in England has been ring-fenced by the Tory-led Coalition and has risen by 1 per cent (above inflation) each year since 2010, the Welsh Assembly has, according to independent think-tank the Institute for Fiscal Studies, chosen to slash its service’s budget by 8.6 per cent between 2010 and this year, rather than make cutbacks in other areas of its bloated public sector.
So bad has the situation become that in September, the Welsh government suddenly announced a decision to plough an extra £425 million into it over the next two years in an effort to ease the funding crisis.
Meanwhile, as patients continue to die and waiting lists grow, Wales’s Labour rulers resort to spouting shamefully irresponsible weasel words to try to explain away the crisis.
A few days ago, for example, First Minister Carwyn Jones was asked in the Welsh Assembly about the BMA’s claim that his health service faces ‘imminent meltdown’.
He arrogantly rejected the suggestion, arguing that his first-hand knowledge of the service - based, he claimed, on discussions with a few old flatmates who are consultants and GPs - painted a much rosier picture.
However, the BMA, which represents 7,000 doctors in Wales, and the families of those who have died needlessly in the care of the Welsh NHS, unsurprisingly remain deeply unimpressed.
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