Kathleen Hines, 92, stayed at Ledbury Nursing Home, in Herefordshire, for nearly three years (Pictures: SWNS)
A 92-year-old woman had maggots crawling inside an open skin cancer wound while she was living in care.
Staff at Ledbury Nursing Home, in Herefordshire, were cleaning Kathleen Hines’s sores when they spotted the maggots, around three weeks before she died on August 7 last year.
They said they immediately cleaned and dressed the wound and reported the incident to the council’s safeguarding unit, called Kathleen’s nephew Chris Hines.
The 52-year-old said: ‘I mentioned this to many medical professionals and, to a person, they are horrified. That this can have been allowed to happen in a clinical setting is beyond belief.’
But the home blamed a heatwave at the time, saying: ‘We appreciate how awful it sounds and wish that it could have been prevented.
‘Maggots being spotted in wounds is something that is not completely unavoidable, especially during a heatwave where eggs can initially avoid visible inspection and hatch within 12 hours.’
This was only the ‘final blow’ for Chris, who has also accused staff at Ledbury of ‘drugging his aunt into oblivion’.
Kathleen Hines, who had dementia and skin cancer, died last August (Picture: SWNS)
Chris is now refusing to pay the last nursing home bill unless they apologise (Picture: SWNS)
He first noticed something was wrong when Kathleen, who had dementia, started falling asleep on their video calls during lockdown.
Chris claims the home, run by Shaw Healthcare, told him his aunt had been given Zopiclone – a drug prescribed for insomnia – ‘to stop her walking around at night’.
He said: ‘I spoke to friends who were working in the care sector who told me this wasn’t right at all and I should take action to stop them chemically restraining Kathleen.
‘Just to clarify, Ledbury Nursing Home should have been just that – her home, and she was paying nearly £4,000-a-month for it to be that.
‘She was perfectly entitled to walk around at night if that’s what she wanted to. Shaw Healthcare’s job was to facilitate her wakefulness, to make sure she was safe and happy while she was awake.
‘Their job was not to drug her into oblivion so they did not have to provide a proper number of staff.’
Kathleen lived at Ledbury Nursing Home in Hertfordshire (Picture: SWNS)
Kathleen, who Chris said weighed around just 50kg, was reportedly given a 3.25mg dose before this was increased to 7.5mg around two to three months later.
Chris quickly raised his concerns with several safeguarding bodies, including the Care Quality Commission, and believed they had helped him ‘put a stop to it’.
He said: ‘I gave verbal instruction that Kath was not to be given Zopiclone any more.
‘However, the MAR charts [a formal record of what medicine a patient has been given] show that even after they were told not to use it, they still persisted in giving it to her – albeit at a more intermittent rate.’
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A spokesperson for Ledbury Nursing Home said: ‘Medication for residents is prescribed by GPs based on their professional assessments.
‘Our duty is to fulfil the GPs medical advice by collecting and administering the medication which we did in the case of Ms Hines.’
Now, Chris is refusing to pay the final bill from the nursing home, where Kathleen lived for almost three years, unless it apologises.
The home stressed ‘the independent safeguarding investigation confirmed that we had quickly and effectively dealt with the [maggots] situation.’
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The 92-year-old woman’s nephew has also accused the nursing home of ‘drugging his aunt into oblivion’.