I READ with regret of the failure once more of Hinchingbrooke NHS Trust staff to care sufficiently for another patient in the colorectal department (The Hunts Post, September 12).

Mr Keetch, it would seem, is another victim of that department’s apathy towards infection. My heart goes out to his family.

As I write, it is seven years almost to the day since my father died after six months of what I can only describe as living hell following an operation for bowel cancer, carried out by Mr Bekdash.

It took almost three weeks for the team to decide what action to take once they had discovered that there was a leak in my father’s urethra, and by then his fate was sealed. He suffered infection after infection, was allowed to become malnourished, despite my family’s best efforts to get staff to keep accurate records and to take more care to ensure he was given appropriate food. He was dehydrated – and again insufficient records were kept – and for one period of 24 hours his drip was left empty.

He was moved twice to Addenbrooke’s because Hinchingbrooke didn’t have the appropriate facilities to insert and re-insert a stent, and eventually contracted MRSI.

His time at that hospital haunts me to this day, despite my own and other people’s better experiences there, since.

Quite rightly, Hinchingbrooke Hospital had its knuckles rapped by the Healthcare Commission after I had put in a formal complaint.

At that time I was assured that new procedures were being put into place (ironically I was already aware that these standards had been introduced nationally at least two years before my father went into hospital, so they should already have been in daily use). But it would seem clear that even now standards of care in specific departments are not up to scratch, and yet they have the audacity to tell us they are ‘drawing a line under past problems’.

Perhaps they don’t realise that in order to do this there is a need to ensure the same problems do not recur. How many times can the same mistakes be made without the people responsible being held to account?

ANNE GODDARD

New Road

Offord Cluny