Former Burnley nurse slams 'dreadful' Blackburn hospital

Saturday 3rd April 2010

A FORMER nurse has branded the standard of care she received at the Royal Blackburn Hospital ‘dreadful’.

Joan Dawson, 80, worked on wards at Burnley General Hospital for more than 50 years.

But the pensioner said she was shocked by modern day standards when she was admitted to Blackburn.

She claims nurses failed to clean her ward of another patient's diarrhoea and vomit, and that the environment affected her recovery from a minor heart attack. Mrs Dawson said she had to ask nurses to be bathed and had to use pillows passed on from other patients because no clean pillow cases were available. Read full article here from the Lancashire Telegraph..

It's OUR NHS says..

Acute emergency services were moved from Burnley to the Blackburn Hospital in November 2007 with Burnley people being told they would receive the 'highest standards of care' at the new Blackburn super-hospital.

In June last year, Dr Foster , the UK's leading provider of comparative information on health care, gave the East Lancashire Hospitals NHS Trust - who run Blackburn Hospital - a score of 27.4 out of 100 for 'patient safety' . The trust were also slammed for cancelling over 37 operations due to lost patient notes and further criticised for having high re-admission rates in children's paediatrics.

In a fiendish twist of fate, the same Hospital Trust recently announced they were continuing their plans to close Burnley General Hospitals' children's paediatric in-patient ward and move it to the controversial Blackburn site.

The people of Burnley, Pendle and Rossendale will never accept that transferring their only children's ward in Burnley over to Blackburn will meet both the needs of the children or their parents/guardians.

East Lancashire hospital Trust promised us that our citizens would receive high-quality patient care in Blackburn when they closed our A&E department in Burnley. Sadly, these were empty promises and almost every week we hear stories of poor patient care, cancelled operations, ambulances queuing, shortage of staff.... the list goes on.

The Hospital Trust have had well over two years to get their act together and sort out the problems at Blackburn hospital but they are still failing miserably.

WE DEMAND HIGH QUALITY PATIENT CARE!

We believe the only way this can be achieved is for East Lancashire to have 'two' Accident & Emergency departments along with childrens' in-patient paediatric services. Both the Blackburn hospital site and Burnley site need to work co-operatively to achieve these objectives to provide quality clinical care and achieve financial balance.

You only have to look at some of the pages on this website to see the chaos that ensued after the A&E at Burnley was closed and moved to Blackburn.

Are we expected to sit back and allow the same thing to happen with our children's ward? NEVER! 

The population of East Lancashire is far too great to be served by one A&E department in Blackburn.
It is far too great to expect outstanding care for our children when evidence has shown the Blackburn hospital is incapable of running efficient A&E services.

Patients' lives are placed at risk time and time again yet we, as stakeholders in our National Health Service, are told that these services are meeting our healthcare needs, when clearly they are not.

It's time to stand up and demand return of A&E services at Burnley to bring calm to what can only be described as a health service constantly in a state of panic.

We expect nothing less than this. We're not aiming for perfection, or world class healthcare, only a healthcare system in East Lancashire  that is stable and provides quality care for all.