New rules see ex-nurse, 64, with these burns directed away twice
PATIENTS needing urgent care may be sent to the unit closest to their homes under new rules, it’s been revealed.
Hospital bosses admitted the ‘protocol’ after one Rochdale patient, suffering horrific burns, reported being sent away from two hospitals before receiving any care.
The Northern Care Alliance NHS Group has introduced the directive as part of a ‘reconfiguration of services across Greater Manchester’, saying that patients will be sent to the ‘most appropriate place for their needs’, ‘closest to their home’, in the ‘quickest time possible’.
However, anyone needing care for emergency and life-threatening conditions can still go to their nearest A&E department for treatment, hospital chiefs have stressed.
The group operates Rochdale Infirmary, Salford Royal Hospital, the Royal Oldham Hospital, and Fairfield General Hospital, among other local care services.
The instructions come as a 64-year-old woman from Norden suffered severe burns after accidentally tipping scalding water on herself while treating sinus problems on holiday in Northumberland.
The woman - a former nurse of more than 30 years - was unable to treat the burns alone, and she returned home with her husband, immediately attending Rochdale Infirmary’s Urgent Care Centre.
Noting that there would be a
Despite being in pain, a patient was sent away from A&E in Bury after a nurse told her that she could not be treated ‘because she was from Rochdale’; right, the patient after receiving treatment for her burns ‘five-and-a-half hour wait’ for urgent care, a staff member sent the patient to Fairfield General’s Accident and Emergency Department in Bury, she says.
The woman, who asked not to be named, told the Observer: “Rochdale had a five-hour wait - people were sitting outside on chairs. There were no chairs left to sit on so it meant standing up, of course, it was my legs that were affected. A nurse on the door said that with a view to it being burns, and a five-hour wait, I would be better going to A&E. The nearest A&E to us in Norden is Fairfield, so that’s where we went.”
But when the patient arrived at Fairfield General, around four miles from her home in Norden, a nurse told her ‘we’re not treating people from Rochdale’ due to a ‘protocol’, she claims.
She says she was then told to go back to Rochdale Infirmary Urgent Care Centre, just under three miles from Norden and five miles from Fairfield. The woman’s husband, who had driven her to both treatment centres, had returned back to their home as he was unable to join her in A&E due to Covid-19 restrictions.
After being informed that Fairfield staff ‘couldn’t treat’ her, she says was forced to sit on the pavement outside the hospital, in pain, until her husband arrived.
“When I got to Fairfield, there was a person on the door taking details, asking all the Covid-19 questions, date of birth, age, what had happened to me,” the exnurse said. “When I said that we lived in Norden and gave him our address, he asked ‘is that Bury?’ I said no, it’s Norden.
“They passed me through to another nurse who checked my temperature, asked what happened – that nurse sent me straight into the triage room.
“I went in there, another nurse asked me, again, all the same questions. She asked me what surgery I go to and I said Edenfield Road Surgery.
“She said ‘that’s Rochdale’, I replied ‘yes’, and she said ‘we’ve got a protocol now that we’re not treating people from Rochdale’.
“I said ‘what?!’, she said ‘I’m really sorry but we can’t treat you’.”
“I couldn’t believe it - I was absolutely dumbstruck,” the patient added.
“I said my husband has dropped me off at the door because he wasn’t allowed in, I was obviously in a lot of pain. And the nurse said ‘I’m sorry but you’ll have to go back to Rochdale’. I told her I’d just come from there and there was a five-hour wait. She said ‘I’m sorry’, then got up and went out and started calling the next patient in. So I didn’t really have a lot of choice. I wasn’t in a position to pick a fight.”
She added: “I just feel like it’s outrageous that someone on their own, in pain, would be turned away from the nearest A&E to them.
“We don’t have an A&E in Rochdale, and we were under the understanding that we could go to Bury which is the next nearest. I just don’t know how anybody can justify treating me like that.
“We had to go back to Rochdale – fortunately I spoke to the same nurse. I told her that I’d just been to A&E and they had refused to treat me. The nurse couldn’t believe it, she said ‘we’ll get you in quicker’ and she took me straight in.”
The former nurse has now been left wanting answers, as ‘it’s a National Health Service, not a local health service’. ●●
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