Hospital faces probe over treatment rooms

London : A flagship hospital is facing an investigation after patients told of their nightmare stays in tiny windowless "broom cupboard" treatment rooms.

Elderly women described being transferred to 12-feet by 16-feet store rooms in the middle of the night — where they were surrounded by blood-stained bins, bandages and shelves of medical supplies.

Some missed meals because they were not on proper wards while others described sleepless nights as nurses continually entered to collect stores.

It has emerged that Norwich and Norfolk University Hospital has 27 cupboards — labelled ‘treatment rooms' and regularly used to house patients — attached to wards.

NHS watchdog the Care Quality Commission has launched an investigation into the £229-million (Dh1.3-million) hospital, built less than a decade ago with private funding, after a flood of complaints.

The scandal came to light when 80-year-old Doris McKeown last week told the Daily Mail how she spent two days in one of the rooms as she awaited surgery for compressed nerves in her spine.

Now 85-year-old Rhoda Talbot has told how she was admitted to the hospital last month with a hairline fracture to her spine and was moved into the ‘stock cupboard' the night before her discharge.

Apology sought

Her son Rod said: "It was literally a store room. There was shelf racking filled with stuff used to run the ward, green buckets with dirty, bloody needles in them and oxygen cylinders."

When Mrs Talbot, from Wroxham near Norwich, was collected by her family, she said: "I'm absolutely shattered. They [nurses] were in and out all night. Every time they came in they turned the light on."

Mr Talbot is planning a formal complaint and wants an apology to his mother over her ordeal.

Another woman, Helen Howes, 35, complained to the ward sister after spending the night in a similar windowless room before urgent surgery on an abscess.

She was hemmed in by dressing packs, catheter bags and other medical supplies and her handbag was put on a medical waste bin.

"Even in the night I was having my bed moved across because the nurses needed to get to something on the left-hand side and my bed was too close for them to open the drawers," she said.

Norwich and Norfolk University Hospital responded that all its treatment rooms were used strictly on a short-term basis.

—Daily Mail