Leicester Royal Infirmary

My mother is 94 in June. She is becoming frail and since December she has had two falls which have set her back considerably. Since December she has been unable to climb stairs which meant that she had to accept a place in a local residential home.

During the first week in the home she fell and broke her hip. This was when we first encountered the treatment meted out to the elderly in the LRI. My mother had been in Ward 32 for a week when she was taken to a toilet to use a commode. When she had finished she pressed her red button for assistance and nobody came. So a nurse had placed a very old lady with a broken hip on a commode and just forgot that she was there. Finally my mother was reduced to tapping out the morse code for SOS on the door until a passing orderly discovered her in some distress.

Now I ask you what kind of individual is so far up her own backside that she forgets the basic rules of care? I am afraid this woman, disguised as a nurse, is so evil she should never be let near elderly patients.

My mother was then moved to Ward 36 only a few days after her operation. My wife and I had a long standing commitment to spend a week with friends in Spain and so we left my mother in the hands of our daughter knowing that my mother would need a period of rehabilitation before she could be released back to the nursing home.

Two days after we left the Occupational Therapist for that ward decided that she could tick all the boxes on her little piece of paper and my mother was now fit enough to be released even though no care package could be arranged for six days! This congenital idiot never once asked the most important question of all. "What will happen to this frail old lady if I release her from the ward without any care package?"

Fortunately my daughter was on hand to ask that vital question and a few others like, "If she can't walk, can't get in and out of bed, can't dress herself and can't shower how the **** does she survive (The asterisks are mine as my daughter doesn't resort to bad language)!"

My daughter was so appalled by the lack of care that my mother was receiving at the hands of the ghouls on the ward that she personally became responsible for the grandmother's care. Single handedly she arranged for a wheelchair, wrapped her up on a very cold day and drove her back to Loughborough. Since then she discovered that in over two weeks, my mother never had a shower/bath, never even had her hair washed and her dental care was so negligent that ulcers were forming on her gums under her dentures.

This treatment beggars's belief! It appears to reaffirm everything that is appearing almost on a daily basis in the mainstream media. Care in the NHS has ceased and is being replaced by computers and tick boxes. Every time that we ourselves visited we saw a huddle of personnel around the admin areas all with their heads glued to a computer screen.

Now of course I know that we still have some very fine nurses but recently we seem to be breeding a new king of nurse. The bully, the vile, the forgetful, the don't give a damn, the ignorant, the lazy and the NHS managers do not seem to have the procedures or even the will to weed them out. It is obscene!

In the meantime my daughter has three times today been described to me as 'an angel' and they are damned right!! I don't think that anyone in the family will ever forget her self sacrifice and kindness. Thanks my love.