Health Service Commissioner : first report for session 1982/83 : selected investigations completed April- September 1982.

  • Great Britain. Health Service Commissioner.
Date:
1983
Catalogue details

Licence: Open Government Licence

Credit: Health Service Commissioner : first report for session 1982/83 : selected investigations completed April- September 1982. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    (b) The complaint arising from the daughter's absence from the Unit on the night of 15/16 October 1980 15. The complainant said in her correspondence and in her discussion with my officers, that at about 10 pm on 15 October the NS had telephoned her home to say that at about 9.40 pm it had been discovered that her daughter was missing. Her daughter had since told her that she had been frightened by stories told by one of the nurses. (The complainant gave the first name and a description of this nurse and I have indentified her as the state enrolled nurse on night duty (the SEN). The NS had agreed to her husband’s suggestion that she should get in touch with the police. The NS she said also told her husband that she would notify them when their daugh- ter returned; they had therefore been anxiously awaiting a telephone call from the ward and it was because of the promise that had been made that she had not telephoned the ward the next day. The police had been in touch with them at mid-morning on 16 October to see if she had returned home. At 2 pm, when they had still had no news, the complainant’s husband telephoned a social worker at the Unit (the SW), with whom they had an appointment at 3 pm that day, and said that there was no point going there to discuss ‘a missing person’, especially as he and his wife had suffered a sleepless night. The SW had replied that the daughter was probably back on the ward by then and that he would check this. The complainant said that they had not cancelled the appointment and that, if the SW had in- formed them that their daughter was back, they would have kept their appointment. However, they had still had no news of her by late that night. The complainant said that the next day (17 October), at about 1 pm, her husband called at a police station to enquire about his daughter. They had seemed surprised by his enquiry and had told him that his daughter was back at the Unit. He therefore visited her that afternoon and was told by the ward staff that she had been back since the morning of 16 October and they thought that he would have known this. The com- plainant said, too, that she and her husband were very unhappy that they had not been consulted about their daughter’s subsequent transfer to the slpecial care unit on 18 October and described it as ‘a case of prime bungling ’. 16. I have seen the nursing notes relating to the care of the daughter and for at least three weeks prior to 15 October these show that her moods were erratic and she was a difficult patient, being described inter alia as: ‘Aggressive ... her usual giggling, unco-operative self . . . disruptive . extremely childish . . . aggravating fellow patients . . . very naughty and childish’. The notes also record that she ran away from the ward on at least nine days during this period and that on 15 October she had left the ward and had had to be brought back by a nurse on several occasions. 17. The DS told my officer that, at the time in question, the daughter was not being ‘specialled’, but, she said, the ward staff were always aware of where she was and would not have deliberately allowed her to go out alone. A staff nurse on day duty (the second SN) said that, as the daughter was an informal patient, they used to allow her off the ward if they knew where she was going within the Unit. The DS recalled that the complainant
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