Three people were arrested in April at Whipps for abusing elderly patients. They are facing prosecution and innocent until proven guilty, of course.

I am not however too surprised. I was up at Whipp's last week and saw an elderly man being left abandonned in a wheelchair in the middle of the chest clinic. He sat there for at least an hour after he was supposed to have been back on his ward and receiving his medication. A few members of staff were aware of his plight, and went through a pantomime of tutting and shaking their heads with a professional show of concern at their colleagues' unprofessionalism but everyone considered it to be someone else's job to get anyone off their backsides to actually do something about it, let alone solve 'the problem' of providing care themselves.

So there the gentleman sat in his chair, distressed and humiliated at being left on his own in his pyjamas in the middle of the day among other members of the public and unable to get anyone to deal with his situation.

None of the concerned 'professionals' thought it was something they should actually deal with themselves. Presumably it was beneath them. The indifference and bumbling incompetence was also clearly something the staff were more than used to: in fact it looked like it was a way of life. There seemed to me to be no-one in charge, or at least no-one with any gumption who could care less about the shoddiness of the way they were running things. The member of staff I complained to about the man's plight simply shrugged it off and said it was not his job: but he could not or would not tell me the name of the person in charge of the staff in that part of the hospital. He did not wear any name tag himself, of course.

In such an atmosphere in this rambling hospital I can see how abusers of patients can feel they can get away with unpleasant behaviour, so it is good to know that the whistle was allegedly blown by some student nurses in the abuse case which has led to arrests.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/health/healthnews/9709295/NHS-patients-experience-contempt-and-cruelty-says-Jeremy-Hunt.html