Just days after a damning report highlighted the plight of elderly patients left malnourished because nurses do not have time to feed them, Norma Scott is referring Airedale General Hospital at Steeton, Keighley, to the Healthcare Commission over blunders she believes contributed to the death of her 84-year-old father, John Farrow.

The pensioner was taken into hospital because he was dehydrated and suffering joint pain. But Mrs Scott, 59, says that over the course of three weeks she saw the 11-stone former Navy seaman deteriorate "into skin and bones".

But nurses told her they were too busy to feed the pensioner so he was going without. When he was eating, Mrs Scott says, the food he was given was too hard, causing him to suffer ulcers in his mouth and making his situation worse.

The following month Mrs Scott, of Ilkley, an only child, wrote to the hospital seeking answers to the catalogue of complaints but has yet to receive a full response.

"He went down this slippery slope that his GP had tried to avoid by sending him to hospital. He was totally neglected from every point of view," she said.

"The nurses said they did not have the time to feed him and said they were short-staffed. The doctor said they could not give him one-to-one attention."

The case comes after a report by Age Concern revealed elderly patients were at risk because nurses did not have time to feed them. In a survey of 500 nurses, nine out of 10 said they did not always have time to help patients who needed assistance with eating and drinking. The charity said 60 per cent of older patients were at risk of becoming malnourished or seeing their health get worse.

The Royal College of Nursing said the report highlighted under-staffing and said malnourished patients were three times as likely to develop complications after surgery and have a higher death rate.

She said: "If we cannot afford nurses to do this work, why do we not get on to voluntary groups? We may need to go back to the days where we had nursing auxiliaries where you didn't need a qualification to work on the ward. You just need people to respond to the needs of their fellow human beings, those that cannot care for themselves.

"Although we have a lot of high technology I do not think we should lose sight of fundamental, basic care. These people just need someone to keep an eye on them."

Bridget Fletcher, director of nursing at Airedale Hospital, said: "We would again like to express our sincerest apologies to Mrs Scott for the length of time it has taken to respond to her letter. We have kept her informed throughout our investigations and have been working on providing a very thorough and detailed response to the issues she has raised about her father's care."

The chief officer for Age Concern Bradford, Keith Nathan, said: "Our findings generally are that nurses were under a lot of pressure. Last year, I received two complaints about patients not being fed properly in Airedale General Hospital. However, we thought that in Bradford they were more aware of the problem in the past year and were adapting to it."

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