People in my constituency of Clwyd West have grown used to poor performance in Wales’ Labour-run NHS and the attempts made by the Welsh Government to hide it.
Over the years we have seen Labour Ministers scrapping and changing targets to avoid embarrassment and make it more difficult to compare waiting times, and ambulance and emergency department performance with other parts of the UK.
But this week saw these attempts stoop to a new low with the publication of a report into the Tawel Fan dementia ward at Glan Clwyd Hospital in North Wales.
The report disputed the findings of a previous investigation which concluded that the disgusting mistreatment of vulnerable patients at Tawel Fan amounted to ‘institutional abuse’.
The first investigation laid bare the horrific goings on in the ward.
It told of patients being left covered in faeces, injuring themselves crawling naked on urine and excrement covered floors, and being physically restrained with tables and chairs.
One family likened the ward’s patients to ‘animals’ being kept in a ‘zoo’.
Eight members of the nursing staff were suspended and health chiefs apologised to families for the ‘inexcusable’ treatment of their loved ones.
The fact that the report into the original investigation was published at all was in large part due to the fact that a leaked copy was obtained by the Mail on Sunday in 2013.
The newspaper’s disclosure of its scandalous contents caused uproar and eventually the Betsi Cadwaladr University Health Board (BCUHB) caved into pressure and was forced to place it in the public domain.
Anyone who read it could hardly fail to reach the same damning conclusion as the author, respected independent health investigator Donna Ockenden: it amounted to institutional abuse.
And yet, the new report published by the Health and Social Care Advisory Service (HASCAS), says there was no evidence of institutional abuse.
Astonishingly, it concluded that care on Tawel Fan was ‘of a good overall general standard’.
Predictably, this was seized on by Wales’ Labour Health Secretary, Vaughan Gething, who said he hoped HASCAS’s conclusions would help ‘lift a dark shadow’ that had been hanging over the North Wales health board for years.
But Mr Gething’s comments were a kick in the teeth to the relatives of the elderly people who were mistreated in the Tawel Fan Ward.
They regard this as an appalling whitewash.
The curious thing about the new report is that in spite of its overall conclusion, if you read it carefully, it lists very similar instances of shocking mistreatment of patients as the original investigation by Donna Ockenden.
Quite how the report’s authors can suggest that their findings represent a ‘good overall general standard’ of care and can so confidently conclude that it was not ‘institutionalised’ is difficult to fathom.
They may not have intended it, but from the conclusions that they draw from what happened in Tawel Fan, you could be forgiven for thinking that being mistreated in a Welsh dementia ward is just one of those things that can happen to old people.
I and the loved ones of those who were abused at Tawel Fan refuse to accept that.
As a result of the original report BCUHB was put in ‘special measures’ by Wales’ Labour Government. In effect, it is now being run by Labour Ministers.
Yet tragically, more than four years since Tawel Fan closed its doors, and almost three years since Labour Ministers intervened, even HASCAS has admitted that there is ‘insufficient evidence’ to suggest that ‘the experience of a patient would be different today’ than prior to the ward’s closure.
That’s a damning indictment of Labour’s running of the NHS here in Wales; Ministers should hang their heads in shame.
We owe it to the families of those whose loved ones suffered appalling treatment and subsequent harm to get to the truth about what happened on Tawel Fan.
Instead of talk about dispelling dark shadows and clouds, we need the cleansing rain of an Assembly inquiry to wash away the spin and for Mr Gething to urgently take the radical action needed to prevent a similar scandal in the future.
Any failure to do so would be a betrayal of the dementia patients from my constituency and elsewhere in North Wales who were treated so badly by those they should have been able to trust on the Tawel Fan Ward.