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Older
people have told nurses and NHS chief executives how it feels to be
ignored and go hungry in hospital at a specially organised event on
Friday 11 May.
60 people shared their views
including Maria Nash, from Barnet, a disabled 60 year-old women who
last year was told a hospital couldn’t provide food to meet her
specialist dietary requirements because of budget cuts. Subsequently
she had to become an outpatient and get to and from hospital every day.
She
said: “The hospital told me my dietary requirements would be catered
for but when lunchtime came I was left hungry and helpless. NHS boards
need to meaningfully involve patients in developing strategies for
providing food to every patient.”
Mala Karasu,
Matron Elderly Care, St Guys and St Thomas’s NHS Foundation Trust, said
about the conference: “This experience has been so useful. This falls
inline with what the trust is working on which is a good nutrition
strategy for older people.”
The event, held at Cavendish Square London, is part of our campaign ‘Hungry to be Heard’
which aims to end the scandal that six out of ten older patients being
malnourished in hospital. Ignoring this problem is a costly mistake –
NICE calculate that the NHS would save £13.3 million if it implemented
guidelines to tackle malnutrition. The total cost of malnutrition in
the UK has been reported to be £7.3 billion a year. A
key recommendation of Age Concern’s campaign is that hospital staff
listen to older people. The results of this conference will be used to
produce a national report on how older people and their relatives think
the NHS should tackle malnutrition in hospital.
Age Concern 14th May 2007
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