KEY POINTS:
An 81-year-old stroke victim tumbled from her Auckland City Hospital bed to the wooden floor below just hours after her family were refused permission to maintain a bed-side vigil.
The hospital's neurology ward staff promised Kay Watkinson's family she would have constant supervision, but no one was present when the fall ripped out her intravenous tubes and left her sprawled on the floor, her body partially exposed and her left arm tangled in the bed-rail a metre above her.
The family spoke to the Herald yesterday, four months after the incident, as they had received no apology from the hospital.
Mrs Watkinson died four days after the fall from unrelated symptoms.
The fall left her with purple-black bruising on her left arm and shoulder, but no internal injuries.
She had tried to roll over and gone a little too far, daughter Susan Grey said. The bed-rail designed to keep her from falling had either not been clicked in properly or was faulty.
Her mother was a private and dignified woman, Mrs Grey said.
She had stayed conscious throughout the fall, and lying exposed while staff hoisted her back in her bed had been "humiliating".
"She was a proud woman, my mum, and she lost her dignity. Part of her body was exposed and she couldn't do anything about it."
The acting ward nursing co-ordinator confirmed in his incident report that constant supervision had not been provided.
He wrote of hearing, from another room, the thump as Mrs Watkinson hit the floor. He was first on the scene five seconds later.
Mrs Watkinson's left arm was "tangled in the bed-rail", and took staff about 20 seconds to free, he wrote.
He believed a faulty bed-rail had not clicked into place properly, leading to the fall.
An engineer was called to the ward and "he examined the bed and agreed with me that as designed, the bed-rail should not have collapsed. The bed has been withdrawn from service".
Yet Mrs Watkinson was put back on the supposedly faulty bed and not changed to another until the family demanded it.
The family yesterday disagreed the bed was faulty.
"There was nothing wrong with the bed. We lifted the rail up, and it clicked, and it wouldn't go down," Mrs Watkinson's husband Les said.
Tousie Grey, Mrs Watkinson's son-in-law, said it was far more likely human error caused the fall.
Mrs Watkinson, a Maori woman, had wanted her family beside her, Mr Grey said. It was traditional in Maori culture that when a family member was sick, relatives stayed with them. No accommodation was made for that cultural need, Mr Grey said.
The hospital's failure to deliver an apology to the family had hurt them, Mrs Grey said.
Auckland District Health Board's clinical services general manager, Margaret Dotchin, told the Herald last night the hospital was sorry to hear of the family's concerns.
"We will be contacting them directly, to update them on our investigations into their relation's fall," she said.
The incident was fully investigated at the time, Ms Dotchin said, and she reiterated that a problem with the side-rail of the bed was the most likely cause as "all other safety procedures had been correctly adhered to".
