Actions that leave a lot to be desired

Apr 21 2009 by Aranda Garrard, The Journal

IT has surely been the week of the lens. Leave aside singing sensations and whistle-blowing nurses for the moment. Without cameras Ian Tomlinson’s death would have seemed what it was first sold to us as – death from heart attack, no-one’s fault.

It was camera and video evidence which led to the second post-mortem, it was film which revealed that policemen were not pelted with missiles as they tended to him, as they had claimed.

It was cameras which uncovered the use of batons on a probably obnoxious but certainly not threatening woman, by a policeman twice her size. Which leads to an uneasy thought – how many bad things happen when there are no cameras around? And how often do we swallow the official line because there is no lens there to disprove it?

Margaret Haywood secretly filmed hospital patients’ suffering for a BBC Panorama programme. She recorded a catalogue of horrors, including blood stains on curtains, faeces left on a floor for days and a woman who had terminal cancer left screaming in pain because she was not given medication. Her film led to a public apology from the hospital concerned and vast improvements in care of the elderly.

Last week her reward was to be struck off by the Nursing and Midwifery Council, bringing an end to her 20-year career. She said: “I knew it was a risk I was taking, but I thought the filming was justified and was in the public interest. There was a former nurse who was afraid to ask to go to the toilet because of the nurses’ attitude. There was no care plan, their fluid charts were not being maintained, they were not getting food or drink.”

She told her ward manager and prepared a report but the information was ‘hushed up’, forcing her to go to the BBC. Nurses ringing in to a phone-in told similar stories of protests being ignored by those in charge. But The Nursing and Midwifery Council found that, given the seriousness of her misconduct, “it would not be in the public interest for her to be able to practice as a nurse”.

Linda Read, chair of the panel, said: “A patient should be able to trust a nurse with his or her physical condition and psychological wellbeing without that confidential information being disclosed to others.”

She added that although the conditions on the ward had been ‘dreadful’, Miss Haywood could have taken other action rather than filming the patients and breaching their confidentiality.

Ms Read, a nurse’s primary duty is surely to do her best for her patient by whatever means left to her. That’s what Margaret Haywood did, in my opinion. If you were old and ill who would you rather be nursed by, stickler-for-protocol Linda Read or end-justifies-the-means Margaret Haywood?

Denise Robertson cannot enter into any personal correspondence.