Nursing and medical staff did not escalate concerns to senior doctor

What happened

Mrs H was admitted to hospital with breathing problems. She said her condition deteriorated because of the poor care she received in the ward. She was sent to intensive care where clinicians diagnosed her with heart and lung disease.

Mrs H complained to the Trust but was unhappy with how it handled her complaint. She said she received contradictory information from the medical and nursing staff, and she was concerned that they did not seem to have learnt from any mistakes, or improved the service. She was unhappy that at the beginning of a meeting about her complaint, a member of staff said that if she wanted to escalate the complaint, the meeting would be a waste of time.

What we found

We partly upheld this complaint. There were failings in Mrs H's care and treatment. These included: a miscalculation of her vital signs; failure to take appropriate observations; failureby nursing staff to properly escalate concerns to the medical team; failure of the medical team to escalate concerns to a senior doctor, and poor record keeping. However, we could not say these failings led to a poorer outcome for Mrs H as she was already very ill.

These failings caused Mrs H and her daughter distress and uncertainty. They felt that if she had had better care on the ward, Mrs H would not have needed to go to intensive care. We agreed the failings left Mrs H uncertain about this, but we found she would have gone to intensive care even if concerns about her condition had been properly escalated to the senior physician.

There were also failings in complaint handling. These were: failure to take statements; poor record keeping; delays in providing responses; incomplete responses; inappropriate approach in a complaint meeting, and no evidence of improvements to the service.

Putting it right

The Trust apologised to Mrs H and paid her £600 compensation. It also paid her daughter £250 compensation and agreed to put plans in place to prevent the same mistakes happening again.