Gossip: 97yr old woman, died after being forced to wait 40 HOURS for stitches while doctors argued over who was responsible for her

A 97-year-old great grandmother died after being forced to wait 40 hours for stitches while junior doctors argued over who was responsible for her.

Josephine Lakin fell out of her bed and cut her head on a short-staffed ward and was only discovered when a cleaner found her in a cramped side room.

It then took doctors at Nottingham's Queen's Medical Centre four days to she had also broken her knee in the fall.


Her devastated family have now received an apology from NHS bosses after they admitted there catalogue of failures in the lead up to her death on October 16, 2011.

Mrs Lakin had initially been admitted to hospital on October 10 with an infection.

However, the day after she was admitted she fell out of bed and cut her head.

It took medics almost two days to stitch up the cut because of a 'disagreement' between junior surgeons and they also failed to realise that she had broken her knee.

She died two weeks later.

A post mortem examination revealed her cause of death to be congestive cardiac failure and the fracture to her left leg.

The widow's devastated family pushed for an investigation into the death and this week received a letter of apology from Nottingham University Hospitals NHS Trust, which runs the hospital.

Her relatives have now condemned the level of care she received at the hospital and urged for elderly patients to be treated with more dignity in future.

Granddaughter Mandy Flint, 43, from Bilborough, Nottinghamshire, said the family first knew something was wrong when they got a midnight phone call from the hospital about the fall.