A GREAT-grandmother left alone outside Royal Blackburn Hospital in the freezing cold for an hour in only her bedclothes has told investigators, “I’d rather die than go back there”.

Eileen Rowland, 78, of Ballater Street, Burnley, had already waited in a corridor for 10 hours for her medication and an ambulance home after surgery to replace an artery in her leg.

The nurse who escorted her out of the hospital at about 7pm went back in to get a coat because of the cold - and never returned. When Mrs Rowland’s transport arrived an hour later, it was not an ambulance, but a taxi.

Hospital bosses have apologised for her ordeal, but the former pub landlady said she wanted to share her ordeal to try to prevent anyone else suffering.

She said: “They quite simply forgot about me. It was freezing cold out there with the wind whipping round the building, and I just didn’t know what to do.

"There was nobody there to ask, and I didn’t dare leave where I was because I thought I’d miss the ambulance.

“They told me there would be an ambulance to take me home, because the wound in my leg meant I couldn’t get in a normal car.

“My daughter would have picked me up in her car if we had known all they would do was call me a taxi, but the doctors had told me I would need an ambulance.

“No-one told me they had called a taxi instead, and they had given him the wrong entrance - he had been waiting at the front the whole time.

“He went up to try and get a nurse to help me in, but they told him they had no-one free, so him and another patient who was outside had to bundle me and my walking frame in.

“It was so embarrassing and I was crying all the time. The taxi driver was a lovely man and it was awful for him, too - I ended up with my nightie all up round me.”

Mrs Rowland’s, whose stay was in September, has only now spoken in response to investigations by a task group of councillors set up by Lancashire County Council’s health scrutiny committee.

It has promised to force a full independent review of health services if there is enough evidence that patients have been put at risk.

Mrs Rowland said: “When I spoke to the councillors, I could tell they were very shocked by what had happened to me. Even before all the trouble with my discharge, things had gone wrong. I waited from two in the afternoon until after six o’clock for a bed when I first went in, and when I got one it had no pillows or blankets.

“I ended up at Burnley General a few weeks later for clots to be taken out of my leg, and it was completely different. Everyone there was brilliant. I would rather die than go back to Blackburn Hospital.”

Gordon Birtwistle, Burnley Council leader and head of campaign group It's Our NHS, said: "We hear a lot of terrible things happening up at that hospital, but Eileen's is a real horror story.

"It's no exaggeration to say she could have frozen to death out there, and if it hadn't been for the taxi driver and the other patient helping, God knows how she would have got home.

“It's disgraceful, and a shocking example of the breakdown of our health services since they shut Burnley's accident and emergency."

In a letter to Mrs Rowland, the hospital trust’s patient advice and liaison officer Stephanie Glover, said: “I would like to apologise on behalf of the trust for this, but thank you ever so much for highlighting this to us.

“Without knowing, we cannot address such matters and ensure that these do not happen to other patients.

"This was totally unacceptable and I cannot apologise enough for the distress this must have caused you.”

from the Lancashire Telegraph 22/1/09