Elsie Devine was 88 and weighed just seven stone when she died on November 21, 1999, after being ‘given enough drugs to lay out a six-foot violent man’, according to her family.
A month earlier, she’d been admitted to the small community hospital, which specialised in respite care, when her daughter Ann, with whom Elsie lived, had to go to London to be with her husband while he received treatment for leukaemia.
Mrs Devine was visited daily by her son, Harry, and kept herself busy sending cards to friends and relatives.
In a card to Ann, she wrote: ‘I feel lost without you all, but never mind. The important thing to me is that you are all alright. Nothing else. I don’t get up here till 8.30 am. One day they let me stay in till lunch. All I did was watch telly.’
Two weeks later, Elsie Devine, who her family say was suffering from a kidney infection, suddenly died. An inquest into her death said that she had been given inappropriate medication at the hospital.
Over the years, using the inquest’s papers and details in her mother’s medical file, her daughter has unravelled, hour by hour, Elsie’s last days. ‘She was treated with strong opiates, and we feel it was an overdose of these that caused her death,’ says Ann, now 71.
In a formal complaint to doctors’ watchdog the General Medical Council, she has explained: ‘On November 18 1999, my mother was administered with a 25mcg fentanyl patch that was only licensed that year to be used for “chronic intractable pain due to cancer”.’
Fentanyl is a powerful painkiller which is up to 100 times more potent than morphine.
Before receiving the patch, Elsie had bathed, had her hair washed and was up and dressed, sitting talking to a doctor. She even signed her pension book. Her medical notes for that morning show she was ‘happy, no complaints. No obvious paranoia’.
Ann’s GMC complaint goes on: ‘The following morning, when our mother woke with the fentanyl patch running at full strength, she was feeling the effects of what was an overdose. She was acutely confused and, most likely, terrified. She was then injected with 50mg of chlorpromazine [a sedative used to treat paranoia and agitation], double the dose for a normal adult and far higher than what should be used on the frail elderly.
‘Fifty-five minutes later, our mum was started on a syringe driver with 40mg of midazolam, another strong sedative, pumping directly into her body. A further 40mg of diamorphine [a painkiller] was added, which is four times the recommended dose.’
Little wonder that tiny Elsie was soon close to collapse.
As Ann says today: ‘After three hours, she fell unconscious and remained in a coma for two days, until she died.
‘It was all without any logic or justification. If you take fentanyl alone, it is only prescribed for people with intractable pain, and Mum was in no pain.’
This one story is disturbing enough — but Elsie was far from alone, say other relatives of the elderly who entered Gosport Memorial never to emerge alive.
They maintain the hospital had a suspiciously high death-rate in what they call ‘end of line’ wards.
Some relatives who visited the morgue to see their loved one’s bodies say it was full. They speak of a climate of fear, with one elderly patient begging his son: ‘Get me out of here — they are trying to kill me.’
A patients’ services officer at the hospital has revealed on an NHS staff internet site that during one busy afternoon, he consoled the next of kin of eight patients who had passed away overnight. Death certificates said they had each succumbed to pneumonia.
He said some of the elderly were ‘scared to go to sleep because they were afraid they would not wake up. They were distressed and frightened about being given painkillers’.
Now 120 families are hoping that the new findings of an independent investigation — headed by the former bishop of Liverpool, James Jones, who chaired the inquiry into the Hillsborough disaster — will end their torment.
It was announced recently that the £13 million inquiry will report next spring after examining 833 death certificates issued historically at the hospital.
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