Compares treatment of old and frail to ‘national scandals’ of mental asylum care
Criticism: NHS chief executive Sir David Nicholson has said that hospitals are ‘very bad places’ for elderly people
Hospitals are ‘very bad places’ for elderly people, according to the head of the NHS.
Sir David Nicholson said they were not the right place to care for ‘old, frail people’, and called for community care to be expanded to accommodate the growing elderly population.
He compared modern treatment of the elderly to the ‘national scandals’ of the Sixties and Seventies caused by treating mental health patients in large asylums.
‘If you think about the average general hospital now, something like 40 per cent of the patients will have some form of dementia,’ Sir David told The Independent.
‘They [hospitals] are very bad places for old, frail people. We need to find alternatives.’
He added: ‘The nature of our patients is changing – and changing rapidly. You are getting a larger and larger group of frail, elderly patients who are confused.’
Sir David, who is currently the NHS’s chief executive, was speaking for the first time since his appointment as head of the Health Service’s Commissioning Board.
The new body will take over responsibility for all NHS services in England from the Department of Health in April.
His warning comes after a series of scandals involving substandard care of the elderly, including at Stafford Hospital, where up to 1,200 patients may have died unnecessarily.
He said: ‘I would compare it with where we got to with the big asylums. If you remember what happened in the 1960s and 1970s, there was a whole series of national scandals about care of mentally ill patients.
Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2265692/Hospitals-bad-places-elderly-says-head-NHS-compares-treatment-national-scandals-asylum-care.html#ixzz2Iai73E1g
