Horror of patients dying in our hospitals

IT stops you in your tracks when you read that over a hundred patients - most of them elderly - starved to death in NHS hospitals last year.

But what really surprises me is that the figures aren't higher.

If you've ever spent any time visiting a geriatric ward you'll know what I mean.

You walk into a room and they are lying there, these poor old folk, helpless and totally dependent on nursing staff.

Proud old people who were the backbone of the country long before it became the sorry, broken, corrupt-from-the-core mess it is today.

Fathers, who a lifetime ago would have been first out of the trenches, and mothers who were always last at the dinner table after the family was fed.

Now they are diminished figures, drifting in and out of consciousness, either with dementia or in too much pain to move.

A dinner trolley is pushed along the corridor and a couple of domestic staff breeze in and drop off plates of lukewarm food on the trays at the bottom of their beds.

If you go out and come back in half an hour later, the old folk are still in the same position. So is the food, congealed and cold.

And so they slowly starve to death, stripped of the fight that took them this far. What a terrible, undignified way to end your life.

I have seen hospital patients left unfed at first hand and have been horrified.

My elderly mother was in hospital a couple of years ago for nearly a month. And for at least the first week, she was in agonising back pain and unable to move, sit up or walk.

If I hadn't happened to have called in outside of visiting hours, I wouldn't have known what was going on.

Her meal lay uneaten and cold at the bottom of the bed. There was no one to help her. Across the room from her, two other women lay, their food untouched.

No wonder they are starving to death.

You want to scream at the hospital staff and accuse them of neglect. But the overworked nurses will tell you they just don't have the staff to spoon-feed every patient who cannot feed themselves. So for a week, I went to the hospital every day and spoon-fed her myself until she was able to sit up.

At least I was in a position to do that - but almost every other patient is at the mercy of the NHS.

We are witnessing the crumbling of the health service on a weekly basis.

We are terrified in case our relatives have to spend time in hospital because they could die of MRSA or the C.diff bug that is rampaging through wards.

But surely to God we are entitled to expect that if they have to go into hospital they won't starve to death?

If someone had told you that 20 years ago, you wouldn't have believed them.

Whatever excuses are offered about cutbacks, it's just unacceptable.

In the hospital my mother was in, they don't even have a kitchen operating.

They ripped out the cooking facilities and replaced them with huge ovens tailor-made to reheat the food that is shipped up in containers from England.

Someone has to tell me the logic in that.

I don't care what anyone says, I refuse to believe that it's not cheaper to employ a few old-fashioned cooks to prepare nutritional meals in the hospital kitchen for patients, rather than transport them hundreds of miles.

With thousands being thrown onto the dole, this would provide jobs - and would also ensure that food and its preparation was monitored.

I'm told in the hospital I'm referring to that things have changed to make designated meal times where nursing staff stop all other duties to ensure that patients are fed. So at least that's an improvement.

But clearly it isn't happening everywhere. If 110 people died in Scotland last year, that's double from 10 years ago.

That it comes at a time when the well-fed men and women who govern us are bloated from sucking the fat of the land at our expense, makes it even more disgusting.

Someone has to answer to this.

One person dying of malnutrition is one too many.

• Peaches vice new look

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