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A woman was left furious after her 74-year-old husband was left sitting in his own urine at Hull Royal Infirmary for up to four hours.
The woman, who did not wish to be named, went to pick up her husband from the hospital after he was discharged following treatment for a bladder infection.
The 74-year-old has suffered from mental health issues for the past three years and his wife says that his “brain does not tell him when he wants to wee” and whenever he is asked if he needs to go to the toilet he would just say no.
By the time his wife, aged 61, arrived at the hospital, she found him sitting in the discharge lounge in his own urine “confused about where he was”.
She says she received a call from the hospital that morning to inform her that she could collect her husband later on that day but she was not told about him being moved to the discharge lounge in the afternoon.
She said: “I left home at 6pm and it takes me an hour to get to Hull. I went to ward 500 and there was another man in his bed.
“I said ‘where is my husband’ and I was told he was in the discharge lounge.
“My husband was there sat all on his own and he had wet himself. They told me he had been sat there since 3pm and I did not get there until 7pm.”
The woman says she was then left to struggle on her own in getting her husband into a wheelchair and out of the hospital.
“There was just the receptionist at the desk,” she said. “She saw I was struggling to try and get him into the wheelchair.
“I had four bags with me and was struggling and someone said to me ‘why don’t you put them bags on the handles’ but nobody offered to help.
“They [the hospital] said ‘why didn’t you ask for help’ but they could see I was struggling and who could I have asked. There was nobody else there apart from the lady in reception. No porters, no nurses, or anything.
“I could have cried. I could have just walked away because I did not know what to do.”
She says the hospital are fantastic in dealing with her husband’s physical health problems but they need to improve on their communication.
She said: “I have struggled with his mental health and for them knowing he has mental health issues to leave him there on his own and let him sit in his own urine was just terrible.
“The hospital needs to change their communication with everybody. They need to communicate better with each other.
“My biggest concern is with who brought him down and just left him there. There should have been someone from the mental health team there with him until I got there.
“His mental health is not going to go away it is just getting worse. He was so confused he did not know where he was. He was sat in all this mess for a while. It was unbelievable.
“All I want is for nobody else with mental health issues to suffer like this and have to go through that experience.”
What the hospital says
Hull University Teaching Hospital NHS Trust has apologised to the couple for their experience and says it will be looking into the matter further.
A spokeswoman said: “We would like to apologise to [the couple] for the issue they have experienced; this is not reflective of the standard of care we aim to provide.
“We can confirm we have received a complaint in relation to [his] experience; we are now investigating the circumstances and will feed back to [the couple] in due course.”
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