4 out of 10 Patients Receive Sub-Standard Care

NCEPOD report reveals shocking levels of poor service and care for hospital patients

The National Confidential Enquiry into Patient Outcome and Death (NCEPOD) released a report this week that revealed wide ranging failures in hospital patient care, with 4 out of 10 patients receiving "sub-standard care".The NCEPOD study reviewed the case notes of thousands of patients that died within 96 hours of coming to hospital between 2006-2007. Expert clinicians were asked to give a view on how good the care was for each individual patient.

THe experts found a wide variety of problems including patients being given poor service and care due to a combination of not being kept up to date about their treatment, staff clocking on and off without handing-over properly and senior consultants not being directly involved in enough decisions.

Katherine Murphy, Director of the Patients Association, said: "These findings in the NCEPOD report run the risk of undermining basic confidence in the NHS. For 4 out of 10 patients not to get high quality care is appalling. Unsurprisingly, elderly patients feature highly in this study and once again they are bearing the brunt of poor care. These are exactly the types of incidents we highlighted in our report 'Patients not Numbers, People not Statistics' - they cannot be called 'isolated'. This report also confirms end of life patients are largely admitted from A and E, so their treatment doesn't feature heavily in Government targets.

"Some of the examples are shocking. Life threatening complications left untreated, poor notekeeping, seriously ill patients deteriorating without prompt action, lack of facilities for emergency surgery, avoidable complications contributing to patient death. We're told patient safety is the number one priority for the NHS-this report suggests it is not. The 'gap" between the vision of high quality care for all and the reality is actually a gulf that will only be closed with radical action from this and future Governments."

New staff structures are also criticised in the report. It states that individual clinicians have become "transient acquaintances during a patient's illness rather than having responsibility for continuity of care." Night-time care is particularly poor, an issue which the Patients Association has consistently spoken out on. Only one-quarter of health teams in hospitals had a coordinated hand-over between day staff and night staff.

End of life care was, once again, heavily criticised. Many doctors are accused of not having enough training or skills to administer the type of end of life care required by their patients.

To download the report and to find out more about NCEPOD, please visit:

http://www.ncepod.org.uk/2009dah.htm

If you or a relative have recevied poor hospital care let us know about, email your experience to helpline@patients-association.com

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