"Bad, cruel" nurses come under fire

       Britain's National Health Service (NHS) delivers sometimes "appalling" standards of basic care carried out by "bad, cruel nurses" who should be banned from the profession, a patients lobby group said yesterday.
       A report by the Patients Association told of people left lying in their own excrement and urine, having to go without food or drink and having call bells taken away from them.
       The group, a charity set up 40 years ago to represent views of patients,demanded an urgent review of basic care standards. The association's president, Claire Rayner, a former nurse and television personality, said she was sickened by the report.
       "For far too long now, the Patients Association has been receiving calls from people wanting to talk about the dreadful,neglectful, demeaning, painful and sometimes downright cruel treatment their elderly relatives had experienced at the hands of NHS nurses," she said in a foreword to the report.
       "I am sickened by what has happened to some parts of my profession of which I was so proud. These bad, cruel nurses may be - probably are - a tiny proportion of the nursing work force, but even if they are only 1% or 2% of the whole they should be identified and struck off the nursing register."
       The Patients Association published a dossier of the experiences of 16 patients,whose stories were outlined by them and their relatives.
       Adrian Goddard described how his mother Pamela, suffering from cancer,was "often found in her own faeces and urine" when family members arrived to visit her. Relatives would "need to prompt staff to come and wash and change her".
       Janet Brooks said her father, Thomas,was left without incontinence pads.
       "He was bleeding rectally and he ended up laying in urine and blood. He also wet the floor and my elderly mother wiped this up while the nurse and the assistant nurse looked on and did nothing to help," Ms Brooks said in the dossier.
       Patients Association director Katherine Murphy said the accounts showed some patients were "denied basic dignity".
       The Royal College of Nursing, which speaks for thousands of nurses, said poor care was "completely unacceptable" but added this should not overshadow what it said was the "vast majority of good quality care given to millions of patients every day".