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Health bosses 'too busy' to investigate mum's MRSA death

27/12/2005

THE daughter of an MRSA victim has been told a health watchdog is too busy to review the case.

Bev Hurst, 48, is furious that after 18 months trying to find out how her mother Margaret Rowley contracted the deadly bug at Bury's Fairfield General she has now come up against a brick wall.

She wrote to the Healthcare Commission two weeks ago asking them to start an independent review of her 70-year-old mother's care and her death in June 2003.

Mrs Hurst, a mum-of-two from Wigan, was shocked when they replied saying: "When a request for review is received our usual process would be for it to be allocated to a case manager.

"As we have received considerably more new cases than we are currently able to allocate to case managers, there will, unfortunately, be a delay in progressing your case."

Inundated

The Healthcare Commission admits it has been inundated with more complaints than it can cope with and can't say when a caseworker might start looking into Mrs Hurst's review.

Mrs Hurst set up a campaign group, called MRSA Action UK, with other people affected by the infection. Last week she told MPs on the Health Select Committee about her experiences.

She said: "I could hardly believe what I was reading, I think it is outrageous.

"I have already spent 18 months pursuing my complaint with the hospital and I think the HCC should be looking into such an important issue straight away.

"I know that this complaint isn't going to help my family now, its too late for that, but we don't want to see anyone else go through what we've had to deal with and we don't want the very serious problem of hospital infections swept under the carpet."

Mrs Hurst is campaigning for cleaner hospitals, demanding every infection picked up in hospital is counted and monitored.

In her mother's case MRSA was not listed on the death certificate and she has asked MPs to make it a requirement to list hospital infections in future as an extra monitoring step.

The commission, which was set up in August last year, received 4,500 complaints in its first six month compared to the 3,000 by its predecessor throughout 2003.

A spokeswoman said that although a case worker investigates the actual complaint other staff would preview the case and gather any extra material they needed.

She added: "We take MRSA very seriously and are currently working on a review of health-related infections. We have had far more review requests than we expected and we cannot say when we will be able to look at Mrs Hurst's.

"We aim to complete our reviews within six months but unfortunately we are not achieving that internal standard currently."

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