I was abandoned, says elderly patient

Jill Jeffs felt abandoned in North Shore Hospital. Overcrowding at the time meant many patients spent hours lying in corridors. Photo / Paul Estcourt

Jill Jeffs, elderly and sick, felt ignored and abandoned when she rang the North Shore Hospital bell and no one came to help her.

Aged 81, the Orewa woman is "Mrs E" in Health and Disability Commissioner Ron Paterson's highly critical report on North Shore Hospital and what he calls its failure to plan for the area's rapidly growing population.

Four of the five of the patients in his inquiry had died, although he said there was no evidence this was caused by treatment injuries or the lapses in their nursing care.

Mrs Jeffs told the Weekend Herald yesterday of the three days she spent in the "Third World" hospital in 2007, the infamous year in which the understaffed facility experienced a flood of patients with sicknesses such as pneumonia, stroke or gastric bleeding. It was overwhelmed.

The regular newspaper stories, the public meetings, the then-Opposition's probing - all focused on the disgrace of a large metropolitan hospital failing its people.

And although the Auckland region's hospitals have added many beds since 2007 and more are planned, some services, with winter bearing down, remain highly stressed.

Auckland City Hospital's adult wards have been extremely busy all year. Occupancy was more than 90 per cent - 85 is the ideal - for the traditionally quieter months of January, February and March. Mrs Jeffs, a Waitemata District Health Board elected member from 2001 to 2004, was sent to its North Shore Hospital in October 2007, suffering viral pneumonia.

On the day she arrived at the emergency care centre, it processed 206 patients. It had so few nurses that care was compromised, Mr Paterson said. It was a "chaotic, understaffed environment".

Quoting a medical adviser, he said: "[Mrs Jeffs] would have been distressed waiting in that environment with acute exacerbation of shortness of breath, feeling that she had been abandoned or was being ignored." Mrs Jeffs confirmed that was exactly how she felt.

"Because of my condition, after an hour or two I needed to go to the toilet because of the diarrhoea." She was on a trolley in a cubicle opposite the nurses' station, but still could not attract their attention. She pushed the help button repeatedly, but still had to wait half an hour for assistance.

Then when help came, the nurse snapped, "'We're busy,' as much to say, 'Don't bother us'," Mrs Jeffs said.

Her 12-hour wait for admission to a ward may seem bad enough, but some waited much longer, in cubicles or corridors, days in some cases.

Overcrowded emergency departments - caused mainly by overcrowded wards - are now acknowledged to cause about 400 deaths a year.

Mr Paterson reserved his greatest criticism for Waitemata's former chief executive Dwayne Crombie and former chairwoman Kay McKelvie, whose job it was "to press the case" for extra funding where a hospital could not meet demand.

Both said Mr Paterson had misunderstood their funding negotiations with the Government. They said their board undertook a $170 million building programme from 2000 to 2006, but the Government rejected their requests to expand North Shore further in 2006 because the board's operational funding could not sustain the additional capital-servicing costs.

Mrs McKelvie said this was because until 2007-08 Waitemata had not received its fair, per-capita share of funding.