Welsh Hospital branded dangerous

Home»HealthWelsh hospital branded 'dangerous' in damning report
The largest hospital in Wales has been branded “dangerous” with patients dying regularly due to increased waiting lists.

By Victoria Ward
4:06PM BST 26 Jul 2013
1 Comment
A damning report by the Royal College of Surgeons found that children admitted to University Hospital of Wales, Cardiff were suffering because of delays and that emergency and intensive care units were "frequently gridlocked" with patients "often stacked up in corridors and ambulances".

It warned that in the first three months of the year, more than 2,000 elective procedures were either not scheduled because of a lack of beds or cancelled.

"This has resulted in increasing waiting lists such that patients are clearly coming to harm,” the report said.

“In cardiac surgery we heard that patients are regularly dying on the waiting list from their cardiac pathology, mostly valvular disease."

It highlighted a "universal consensus" among clinicians that some services at the hospital were "dangerous" and of "poor quality" and required urgent attention.

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Ann Clwyd, a Labour Party MP for Cynon Valley, claimed it was the Welsh equivalent of the Stafford Hospital scandal and called for a public inquiry.

Hospital chiefs insisted they were addressing the “unacceptable” situation and said they were looking at all options to increase cardiac surgery capacity.

An action plan has been agreed with Cardiff and Vale University Health Board (CVUHB) and will be reviewed in the autumn.

The RCS report followed a visit to surgical departments by its Public Affairs Board for Wales in April this year.

It found that children with ear infections were being fitted with hearing aids because of a lack of time and resources to insert grommets and that other patients were "suffering complications" because of delays in treating kidney stones

The report said the most prevalent complaint from clinicians related to the inability to admit patients for elective surgery, amid claims that it was not valued by the health board.

It noted claims that reducing elective surgery had been done in order to reduce costs and meet financial targets.

The report also said that some services had been "effectively suspended".

Miss Clwyd, who is leading a government review into hospital complaints, told BBC Radio Wales that UHW had the highest mortality rate of any hospital in Wales and that it accounted for the "vast majority" of complaints she had received from Wales.

"I think it's very serious – I think it's the equivalent of Wales' Mid Staffs," she said.

"It was mortality rates in Mid Staffs that first raised the alarm [there] and because of that there was an inquiry."

The Francis report into the scandal at Mid Staffordshire NHS Foundation Trust between 2005 and 2008 found that up to 1,200 people had died needlessly.

Adam Cairns, chief executive of the CVUHB accepted that the situation earlier in the year had been cause for concern.

He said: "We know we can do better and we have given priority to the issues raised in the RCS report.

"Some of the concerns identified in that document echo those raised by colleagues during our listening exercise earlier this year and work has been under way to address those.”

Mr Cairns said the first few months of 2013 were "a time of relentless pressure" on the NHS.

He told BBC Wales: "The circumstances that we found ourselves in, I think, are unacceptable, and we've got to make sure that in the future that we have a much better response."

But he promised that steps had been taken to protect surgical beds for children's services.

The report comes less than a week after the Royal College of Physicians warned that vital NHS Wales services were at risk of collapse because of severe staff shortages.