Family horrified after hospital wrongly declares father dead
Hospital staff declared a 76-year-old patient dead in his medical records, despite reviving him after his heart stopped for two minutes.
Colin Dawson, a retired lecturer in engineering and grandfather of four, apparently died for a period of two minutes in May while under the care of the Countess of Chester Hospital.
However, his family only found out a month-and-a-half later when they saw “RIP” written in his medical notes.
His daughter, Pam le Ballois, said the distressing discovery was just one in a series of incidents her family have had with the hospital since her dad was admitted in April, when he fell ill at a restaurant in Chester.
She explained that her father’s health has since declined to the point that they believe this Christmas could be his last.
Dr Dawson’s family sent a formal complaint to the hospital in May after he had an unsupervised fall, resulting in a bleed on the brain.
‘Medication into his lungs’
Mrs Le Ballois said: “He should have been supervised but he was not. Because he has Parkinson’s and needs daily medication they said he’d need a nasal feeding tube to give him his meds. They put it in the wrong place and before they realised they had administered medication into his lungs.
“He got pneumonia and a lung infection and I was told he was lucky to survive.”
The family then had to wait six months to get Dr Dawson discharged to a rehab ward so he could see a physio to help him regain strength.
“We are told he won’t now be able to put the weight back on and, realistically, he won’t be able to walk again. His legs are skeletal.”
Mrs Le Ballois said that Dr Dawson, who has a PhD from Imperial College London, “is unlikely to ever come home”.
She added that it has been virtually impossible to get any meaningful response from the “faceless organisation”, whose last contact with her was over a month ago.
Mrs Le Ballois’ local MP Chris Matheson wrote to the Countess of Chester Hospital on the family’s behalf in August, requesting an explanation for Dr Dawson’s treatment, but the hospital did not respond.
Series of scandals
This is the latest in a series of scandals to do with patient care at the Countess of Chester Hospital.
A spokesperson for the Countess of Chester Hospital NHS Foundation Trust said: “Our complaints procedure is there to support patients and their families to raise issues and ensure they are dealt with quickly however we recognise that on this occasion, we fell short of the standards we set for ourselves. We would like to apologise to the family for not having dealt with the complaint in the way that they had a right to expect.
“We are in direct contact with the family so that we can discuss and resolve the complaint and the specific issues they have raised. We are actively investigating the complaint and so it would not be appropriate for us to comment publicly while that process is ongoing and before we have given a detailed response to the patient and family involved.”
