This is rather remarkable. According to a story in the UK-based Daily Mail, a man was left to die, on a hospital floor, over a period of 10 hours.
I’m not sure whether this is the worst example of government-run healthcare (or non-healthcare, to be more precise). I’ve commented before about the sub-par government-run healthcare system in the United Kingdom, including patients dying of malnutrition, patients suffering needless pain and discomfort, and patients dying from poor care.
Or sometimes the bureaucracy waits for you to die over nine months rather than 10 hours.
But this story is a rather sobering example of what happens is a bureaucratic system. I guess the staff at the hospital decided to be an unofficial death panel. And if you don’t treat people, that is one way of keeping costs down. Here are the grim details from the report.
Nurses casually stepped over a patient as he lay dying on a hospital floor. Peter Thompson, 41, was left in a corridor for ten hours before someone noticed he had passed away. In a final act of indignity, hospital auxiliaries pulled his lifeless body across the floor in a manner his family described as like ‘dragging a dead animal’. The scenes which shame the NHS were all captured on CCTV. Staff thought Mr Thompson was merely drunk and left him to ‘sleep it off’. Yesterday a coroner condemned the death as ‘wholly preventable’. …The hospital’s accident and emergency department was just 200 yards away. Last night it emerged that three nurses face a disciplinary inquiry over their inaction. Mr Thompson’s parents Alan and Rene labelled his treatment ‘inhumane’ and accused nurses of ‘disgusting neglect’. His father, 71, a retired production line worker, said: ‘Seeing your own flesh and blood being dragged across the floor like a dead animal is heartbreaking. ‘It was just inhumane what they did a …Mr Thompson’s daughter Carly, 23, added: ‘He went to them for help and they left him out in the corridor to die cold, wet and lonely with nothing.’
If you read the entire story, you will discover that Mr. Thompson is not the most sympathetic character. He was on drugs and booze and I can understand that the staff may have concluded that he was merely drunk. But to leave him alone for 10 hours?!?
