BBC’s Newsnight showed secretly filmed footage of patients at specialist rehabilitation units who were receiving unacceptable, and often negligent, standards of care. This included a patient being given drinks when he had been marked as nil-by-mouth and footage of a healthcare worked cleaning a feeding and medicine tube with a pen nib.
Perhaps most worryingly, although many of the centres professed to be specialists in rehabilitation care, many of the healthcare workers had no specialist training. This has potentially damaging consequences for the brain injured person and their family, as following a brain injury, the brain has to rebuild pathways to re-learn the skills the person once took for granted. This is why specialist rehabilitation and care are so vital, and if they are not provided, the person affected may not recover as well as they might have done and this can be irrevocable.
Professor Michael Barnes, a specialist in neurological rehabilitation medicine who also chairs the UK Acquired Brain Injury Forum said: “There are some very good rehabilitation centres in this country, but equally I’m afraid there are units in this country that really don’t provide proper co-ordinated rehabilitation at all. And yet that’s what they are called. And that, I think, is a sad reflection and something needs to be done about that.”
Responding to concerns that falling levels of care may be the result of hospital cuts, Professor Barnes made the case for universal levels of care that could actually save the state money in the long run.
“There is good evidence that although rehabilitation costs more money clearly than someone going home…that money is recouped over two to three years by that person requiring less support from the state, getting back to work and earning money”.
Read the source article here:http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-24958181
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