By Lesley Walsh
A BANGOR man has been stranded in a hospital fracture ward for five months despite needing specialist care for his Alzheimer’s, which has got ‘significantly worse’ over the period.
Joe Hagen fell on December 18 and because the backlog at the Ulster Hospital would have delayed the pain- stricken man’s admission in a seven hour ambulance queue, he was taken to the Royal Victoria Hospital.
He was operated on for a broken hip but instead of being released following his recovery, the 69 year-old has been left almost confined to a hospital bed with ‘no stimulus whatsoever’.
Joe, who suffers a complex mix of other health complaints including heart failure and prostate cancer, spends his days crying as wife Sharon looks on helplessly.
Sharon, a 62 year-old former teacher previously looked after Joe at their house in Ballyholme, but since the accident, she has been fighting a losing battle to find somewhere with appropriate specialist care for him.
Meanwhile, she said his progressive dementia condition is getting worse by the day and he is a shadow of his former self, once a large and robust man who played rugby, and enjoyed a career as a quantity surveyor.
Sharon explained her husband’s plight began during a visit to a supermarket in December. She left Joe, who is a wheelchair user, in the car but he managed to get out and suffered a fall, breaking his hip.
His hip was replaced by surgeons in the Royal Victoria and Sharon expected him to be moved out of the fracture unit fairly quickly.
A total of 229 days after being admitted, Joe is still in the fracture unit.
Sharon said that in the beginning, her husband suffered psychotic outbursts, but staff said they couldn’t give him anything until psychiatrists assessed him, but that did not take place until the end of January.
“During the time we were waiting for the psychiatrists he was wailing the whole time, it wasn’t just crying. I kept asking the staff ‘can you not give him something’ but they couldn’t because he hadn’t been assessed.”
With their hands tied, staff just couldn’t offer Joe the care he needed.
“It’s an acute ward and they were looking after people who were in terrible pain because they were waiting for a hip replacement or there with two broken legs or whatever. Their priority is not making sure Joe is clean and washed or that he has someone to talk to, or has someone to feed him because he is not very good at feeding himself – staff just don’t have the time for that.
“He’s supposed to be on one-to- one care but they just don’t have the staff to give him one-to-one care,” Sharon said.
Sharon also had to ‘fight’ to bring his wheelchair on to the ward, not only to aid him going to bathroom, but also to afford him the freedom of having his family wheel him away from the ward for brief respite.
Describing the last five months as a ‘rollercoaster’, Sharon continued: “Everyday I go up I don’t know what I’m going to find. I went up on Sunday and he was just sitting on the bed crying. It wasn’t the terrible wailing from before but he was just crying. He’s getting no stimulus whatsoever.”
And though Sharon has praised the staff at the RVH’s fracture ward as ‘absolutely amazing’, she said ‘everyone agrees he’s not in the right place’.
She said that with patients frequently coming and going, and staff regularly changing, Joe has been denied the comfort of seeing familiar faces.
“He is less than half the man he was,” she said. “He was a huge big man of about 20 stone and is now this wee frail man. He has lost so much weight, and I know that Alzheimer’s makes him eat less and I know it’s going to progress, but I know its progression has been exacerbated since he has been in,” she said.
“I know my Joe is suffering.”
Sharon, as an only child, also cares for her 84 year-old mother a few times a week, and had to give up caring for one of her grandchildren after Joe was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s four years ago. She also blames herself for his accident, though her three grown children have repeatedly stressed it was in no way her fault.
Sharon did reveal this week that hope has finally emerged, when she learned Joe might be offered a place at a Dundonald nursing home.
But she fears getting her hopes up, because she has had them dashed before, after a Belfast nursing home one day dangled the prospect of a room, only for her to learn the next day that it would be offered to another patient.
“They hadn’t even assessed Joe,” she said.
She is now pinning her hopes on the Dundonald nursing home, and anxiously awaiting news of a room.
