News

CHC calls for new powers to represent patients

A community health council is urging the Government to develop national safeguards for patients who are transferred from long-stay hospital to private nursing homes, in the wake of eight deaths.

Barnet CHC is meeting health minister Paul Boateng on October 14 over various issues, including its request that CHCs’ powers to represent NHS patients be extended to people who have been transferred to private nursing homes.

This follows an inquiry into the death of eight elderly dementia patients shortly after they were transferred from Napsbury Hospital in Hertfordshire to Elmstead House, a private nursing home in Hendon.

A spokeswoman for Barnet CHC said the powers would act as a safeguard for patients and ensure they had an independent voice.

Health authorities should ensure that these rights are written into contracts with private nursing homes, following a court ruling in Bedfordshire earlier this year, but many are not doing so.

Barnet CHC’s call followed criticism of a health authority inquiry into the Elmstead House deaths which resulted in the Government announcing plans to develop national guidelines for similar transfers in the future.

Eight patients, all over 80 years old, were among a group of elderly patients transferred from Napsbury in April.

In most cases, they died days after the move. The inquiry, headed by Barnet’s director of public health Dr Stephen Farrow, was published at the end of July and contained 74 recommendations.

It said failures in the transfer process were likely to have contributed to the deaths, including the fact that confused patients were handed over to new nurses with little preparation and there was no one organisation taking responsibility for the whole process.

All transfers from long stay hospitals have been frozen until the recommendations to improve the monitoring process are put into action.

An Independent Review Group, announced in September, will ensure that no further transfers from long stay hospitals will go ahead until adequate community services are set up.

Some voluntary organisations expressed anger at the inquiry into the Elmstead House affair, saying it was not independent enough.

Apart from the organisations involved in the transfer there was only one person from the voluntary sector who did not work for a local group.

Mind in Barnet, which has an advocacy service at Napsbury, and the local branch of the Alzheimer’s Society were not invited to take part.

Barnet Health Authority said local voluntary organisations were not invited to take part because the HA did not want to choose any one organisation above others and could not accommodate all the local groups.