If you’re not reading Dr John Crippen’s blog then you bloody well should be. As well as having lots of children to look after you when you get old and saving for a trip to Dignitas when it all gets too much.

Some will remember a speech Neil Kinnock gave in 1983 when, on the eve of the General Election, he said that under a Thatcher Government, “I warn you not to fall ill, I warn you not to get old.” (Owen has a transcript of the speech.) Well, its 23 years later and we have a Labour Government. Would you want to be sick and old now? Maybe not.

Third patient in is Mary, one of the local speech therapists. She is approaching retirement. I sent her husband into hospital three weeks ago in rip-roaring heart failure. He was on CCU for three days but now is on the far flung corner of Dixon, one of the medical wards. He is partially sighted due to an old stroke, and is hard of hearing. The nursing care is appalling. He has developed pressures sores on his sacrum and heels and, oddly, a suppurating area above both ears which Mary thinks is due to the oxygen mask he uses being too tight. He is losing weight because he cannot really manage to feed himself. Mary was in each day over the weekend. Uneaten food from Saturday was still on his bedside table on Sunday. Mary went to the nursing station at the end of the ward. The nurses were all eating take-away Pizza. Deep Pan pizza from Pizza Hut. Mary remembers that particularly. Mary thinks her husband is dying. She is not sure which consultant he is under, and has not been able to find a doctor to talk to. The nurses over the weekend do not speak English. She tried to tell them that her husband is partially sighted but they do not understand. They show here the nursing assessment. Under “visual problems” it says “none”. Mary is in tears and asks what she should do. I suggest she phones the Chief Executive and makes a formal complaint.

We’re told we shouldn’t use one case to damn the whole system. We can’t go into detail about individual cases. I’m sure that’s a comfort to Mary and her husband, not mention the man Dr John talks about who the hospital sent home “to his eighty year old wife with one of the worst pressure sores I have seen in years.”

Individual cases. Isolated incidents. Apart from ones that aren’t. “It goes on all the time. I have had two bad ones today alone,” says Dr John in his comments of other pressure sore sufferers.

Still, they can console themselves as their infected sacrums are treated that it would have been much worse without the “unprecedented” investement under this Labour Government.