The U.K.’s Daily Mail is reporting that the father-of-three was admitted to Worcester hospital July 30, after contracting a blood infection after a chemotherapy treatment. Turner is battling bowel cancer, and has already undergone surgery to remove a tumor from his bowel. When he suddenly developed a high fever after a chemotherapy treatment, his wife Joy rushed him to the hospital, where a blood infection was diagnosed. With no beds available, however, Turner was left lying on a gurney in a corridor with over 50 other patients, both male and female. (Related: Top doctors admit that chemotherapy is one of a dozen procedures that gives no benefit.)
Half-naked at the time, and with a female patient less than a foot away from him, Turner says he feels like he lost all his dignity that day.
“I was half-naked, wearing nothing but pyjama shorts,” he says. “I was a name and a number.”
While Turner has nothing but praise for the nurses and doctors working in what he calls “intolerable conditions,” he is horrified by the incompetence of the hospital’s management. (Related: Discover other examples of medical malpractice at Medicine.news)
Having distributed Gideon’s Bibles in Abidjan, Ivory Coast, and receiving medical treatment in local hospitals there, Turner is no stranger to dirty, disorganized hospitals. Nonetheless, he insists conditions at Worcester hospital were similar to those in West African hospitals.
Earlier this year, two patients died in these overcrowded corridors, and another was found hanged on one of the wards.
Turner has written letters of complaint to just about every possible authority figure at the hospital and in the city, but is unlikely to receive much sympathy.
A spokesman for Worcestershire Acute Hospitals NHS Trust told the Mail, “We're sorry that Mr Turner was unhappy with his experience in our A&E department and understand the anxiety caused when any patient has to spend some of their stay in the A&E corridor. It is important to note, that the corridors referred to are a fully enclosed part of our A&E department, and these patients are cared for by the same doctors and nurses as any other patient in the department. This is not the experience we aspire to provide for patients, but during the busiest periods it is sometimes necessary to utilise a corridor to enable us to treat all the patients who attend our A&E. We recognise the challenges we have around patient flow and the impact this has on our emergency department. We are continually focused on making improvements, ultimately to eliminate the need for any patient to spend time in the corridor.”
In other words, the hospital isn’t going to do anything to try to compensate Mr. Turner for his suffering and humiliation. With socialized healthcare you really are just a number, at the whims of a system that cannot see you as an individual with needs and feelings.
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