Report details appalling treatment of elderly Fordingbridge Hospital patients

Heath chiefs have released a heavily censored version of a report published a year ago following an investigation into substandard care at a hospital.

Officials tried to keep its findings secret, repeatedly blocking attempts by the Daily Echo to obtain a copy under the Freedom of Information Act.

Now they have been ordered to supply one after the Daily Echo lodged an appeal with the Government’s Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) and he overruled Hampshire Primary Care Trust’s decision to withhold the 90-page document.

But large sections have been blanked out, concealing the names of nurses and details of the way in which they behaved at Fordingbridge Hospital.

Despite the shocking nature of the report, 151 sections have been removed – 58 of which have been blanked out to prevent “distress to staff”.

Last night the trust’s censorship of the report, done under the advice of the ICO, came under fire from Hampshire health campaigner Terry Scriven, who lives near Fordingbridge.

Colonel Scriven, the Liberal Democrats’ prospective parliamentary candidate for New Forest East, said: “It’s a real nonsense. There may be occasions on which it’s necessary to withhold employees’ names to prevent the stigma following them around, but I can’t understand the rationale behind the decision to delete great wadges of text on what went wrong. People have a right to know what individual nurses did.”

The sections of the report that have been released amount to a damning indictment of conditions at the hospital at the time.

It says poorly trained staff adopted a “casual, thoughtless and off-hand attitude” to patients, leaving them unsupervised in the dayroom for long periods and eating some of their food.

The report also criticises bosses, saying they failed to provide effective leadership and did not take disciplinary action when necessary.

• The full report - some sections have been removed by the Trust.