AN ELDERLY woman endured a ten-hour wait in a wheelchair without water or pain relief in Southend Hospital’s A&E department, and another waited two days to be discharged, it has been claimed.

Southend councillors told Andrew Pike, chief operating officer of the Mid and South Essex Hospital Trust which runs the hospital, about their experiences after hearing about improvements made at Southend.

Donna Richardson, Labour councillor for Blenheim Park, told the council’s people scrutiny committee: “An elderly patient entered A&E last week and she was left in a wheelchair for ten hours without any water or medication for the pain. She was in a lot of pain. She couldn’t go to the toilet either. What process are you going to be implanting to try and help elderly patients in A&E?”

Mr Pike said: “I’m not complacent. There is a lot to do and bearing down on waiting times is the next challenge.

“Every patient in the emergency department should be regularly checked on. We should be checking the waiting times. We should be supplying food and support for patients who are there for a long time.

“We should be checking patients have got family support. The fact that this patient was there for 10 hours and was elderly and was left sitting there should not have happened, so I’m very sorry to hear that and that’s not something we should tolerate.

“The systems were put in place. It shouldn’t have occurred.”

Fellow committee member Helen Boyd, Conservative councillor for Blenheim Park ward, told Mr Pike of her own father’s experience after waiting two days to be discharged.

She said: “I have to say I don’t think your discharge is working at all well at the moment. Elderly patients who had somewhere to go, to as in well recognised care homes, have not been allowed out for two days even though they were medically discharged.

“It was chaotic to be perfectly honest. My father was cleared for discharge on Thursday and if I hadn’t gone in there on Saturday lunchtime, I rather fear he would still be there.”

Mr Pike said “I do want to reassure you the process of our integrated discharge team working with our hospital at home team or the enhanced discharge service, our care planning our liaison with our passenger transport service is better.”

He added a pilot scheme, to create a ward specifically dedicated to discharging patients who were ready to go home, had proved a success.