Who Cares?: One Family’s Shocking Story of Care in Today’s NHS

The figures are shocking - every year about 34,000 people die unnecessarily in today’s NHS hospitals and another 25,000 are unnecessariy permanently disabled. These victims of NHS mistakes, bad hygiene and poor care are our loved ones. Amanda Steane’s Who cares? is one of these 59,000 horror stories. Her husband Paul went into hospital with a minor problem - through repeated neglect in two NHS hospitals, he emerged an invalid. Throughout his time in hospital, his wife Amanda desperately tried to alert nurses, doctors and managers to the things that were going wrong with her husband’s care. Each time, she alerted them to a new horror, they would promise that nothing like that would ever happen again - but things just got worse. Finally, an invalid deprived of his independence, his legs, his ability to communicate and everything he enjoyed, he took his own life. Hospital managers denied all responsibility by claiming key parts of Paul’s medical records had been ‘lost’. But a nurse, outraged at what she saw, sent Amanda copies of the ‘missing’ records and the police were called in to investigate.