Every now and then I see a news article which leaves me truly shocked, and earlier this week I read about the tragic case of a young patient who was so badly neglected by medical staff that he died of dehydration.Kane Gordy, who was only 22, was in hospital for a hip operation, after his bones were left weak following a battle with a brain tumour back in 2009. Medical staff at St George’s Hospital in Tooting, London, neglected Kane so badly that he was forced to call 999 as he was so desperate for water.
Police visited the hospital after the call but were turned away by staff – and Kane died soon after.
Stories like this are thankfully rare, but this does not make them acceptable. Doctors and nurses train for years to be able to look after others, and most go into their profession due to their naturally caring nature, so when this basic level of humanity disappears it is truly disappointing.
What makes this incident even more unacceptable is that it was caused by so many errors on the part of so many different people - from nurses not giving consultants the information they needed to provide the right treatment, to other professionals leaving vital facts out of medical notes.
An inquest into this completely avoidable death should hold those responsible to account, and ensure that lessons are learnt. To die in a hospital from a lack of water is appalling and shows that medical staff at the hospital failed to provide the most basic level of care to Kane.
In this case, the neglect unfortunately led to the patient’s death, but there are also many cases of medical negligence which leave permanent and lasting damage on those who survive. In these cases the victim could be entitled to claim compensation for the negligence they suffered.
Some nurses are very caring but so many just go into it because they're paid for it essentially by the government. Its no longer a vocational path. The nurses at my local hospital were terrible when caring for my Dad (a dying man) and the community nurses were even worse. The kindest nurses were in the Palliative Care department at the Royal Marsden Hospital. So human with an empathy and strength not matched by other nurses that were assigned to CARE for my Dad.
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