"Poor care after a motorway accident. "

My husband had a terrible accident whilst working on a motorway near London, he fell and received critical head injuries, broke many bones and smashed his shoulder.

The paramedics worked on him on the motorway where he had accident, they were great - he's still alive.

After 10mins someone called me, it was one of his friends. We got to the hospital down in London quite late and the hospital was locked. To get in we had to register as patients, I was there filling in forms for 20mins. They were asking me stupid questions, I just wanted to get in to see my husband.

At 3am the security guard had to unlock all the doors, this took another 20mins. In all it took 40mins for me to see my potentially dying husband.

The intensive care was brilliant - there was a nurse there all the time. She told me that his consciousness was good and explained everything. They also let us stay at the hospital, I had the nurses’ room and my friend slept in the waiting room.

However things started to get worse, I recognised my husband had a spinal fluid leak, I alerted the nurses, who had missed this. Then on he was put on antibiotics.

Then he was put on IC for 3 days, then moved to the High dependency ward, because they needed his bed on IC.

The HDW was not clean, we saw people dying all the time, it was also very small.

Next to my husband someone died, the nurses drew the curtain and placed the corpse in a body bag. But there was fluid leaking out of the body bag, it ran under my husbands bed. I ran and told the nurse, but all she did was to take the sheets off the bed and used them to soak-up the fluid. This was then left in a pile well into the afternoon.

I found myself staying with him from 9 till 9 as I was scared to leave him. I even cleaned him because I didn’t think they were doing a proper job.

He was also really hard to control at times, but no-one helping me. I was very upset and found myself shouting at the nurses, all they did was just sit on the desk.

He was then moved onto a Medical Ward, this was a terrible experience. He had been on oxygen but the equipment down on this ward was unclean. I saw that a nurse was going to hook him up with dirty oxygen pipes, (this was done to take all the loose fluid off the chest), but it had already been used.

He was really confused when on morphine and no-one checked whether he had drugs. He wasn’t getting washed, he was confused he didn’t even know when to eat or wash himself. I felt there was a poor level of care, I left the room for just a few minutes and when I came back he was drinking mouth wash! He was really confused. But they thought he could look after himself. One time I asked if I could clean him, so I went to the wash room and it was filthy with faeces everywhere. I asked if a nurse could clean it, and one of them responded by handing me a mop and bucket!

There was one point where they stopped his morphine, but he couldn’t communicate that he was in pain. I just remember turning up and he was “frothing” at the mouth. A mistake had been made and they had just stopped all his medication.

The physio said there was nothing wrong with his shoulder, but you could quite clearly see it was smashed and even a bone sticking out.

Then he was moved onto the Orthopaedic ward which was really good. They seemed so much more experienced to deal with these accidents. Someone was watching him all the time. I couldn’t believe there were no MRSA tests

He was discharged after 5 days,