Hospital accused of falsifying records of diabetes patient

It has been reported that a health board in Wales falsified the clinical records of a diabetes patient after he died.
The Hywel Dda Health Board has apologised to the family of the 80-year old ma, who was admitted to Bronglais Hospital in Aberystwyth in 2008, admitting that the care he received was inadequate and that some of his records had been changed after his death. Peter Tyndall, the public services ombudsma, has upheld a complaint by the man’s daughter against the board, after she claimed that the hospital had not kept a full record of her father’s diabetes regime and had failed to monitor his blood sugar properly.
Hospital staff have been accused of changing the notes to prevent failures over his blood sugar monitoring being uncovered, and the daughter argued that these failures contributed to her father having a hypoglycaemic event, leading to a heart attack.
Tyndall concluded that “there appeared to be a deliberate attempt to cover up the lack of blood sugar monitoring,” and that there had been other occasions when records from Hywel Dda Health Board had been altered to make things look better.
He added “In the course of our investigation we discovered that even when doctors had specified – as they had in this instance – that someone should be monitored every four hours, the practice was to monitor them every six hours, which clearly was inadequate. But in this case even that didn’t happen.”