Welsh NHS has ‘failed to learn’ from 2014 hospital scandal which saw dementia patients left covered in faeces and physically restrained with tables and chairs, damning report ten years on reveals

The Labour-run Welsh NHS has failed to learn the lessons of one of Britain’s most shocking hospital scandals, according to a report.

The Mail on Sunday revealed in 2014 how elderly patients at a hospital in North Wales were left covered in faeces, injured themselves crawling on urine-covered floors and were physically restrained with tables and chairs.

Nurses in the Tawel Fan dementia ward at Glan Clwyd Hospital, near Rhyl, were found to have threatened and sworn at patients, left them naked and taunted them about their past love lives.

Almost a decade on, a fresh review commissioned by the Welsh government has found NHS bosses failed to implement a string of recommendations to prevent the appalling abuse being repeated.

Health expert Donna Ockenden made 50 recommendations across two reviews into the scandal.

But the new report by the Royal College of Psychiatrists (RCP), seen by the Mail, could only find ‘good’ evidence that just 19 of her recommendations had been fully implemented by Betsi Cadwaladr University Health Board, which manages the hospital. 

It found ‘some’ evidence another 28 had been implemented. There was little evidence of progress on the other three.

Ms Ockenden’s second review in 2018 said the board’s leadership was ‘wholly inappropriate and significantly flawed’ and found it employed just one consultant nurse who specialised in dementia.

Six years on, the RCP could find no consultant nurse ‘with specific responsibility for dementia within the mental health and disability directorate’.

Relatives of former patients on the ward, which closed before the MoS exposé, voiced their anger tonight. John Stewart, 59, whose late father-in-law John Martindale was on Tawel Fan, described it as a ‘disgrace’.

He confronted Vaughan Gething, Welsh health minister from 2016 to 2021 and now first minister, with the report as the politician kicked off Labour’s election campaign in Llandudno on Thursday. ‘He’d not even read it,’ said Mr Stewart.

In 2018, a report by the Health and Care Advisory Service found no ‘institutional abuse’ at Tawel Fan but accepted there were failings. 

It made 15 recommendations – the RCP found ‘good’ evidence that nine had been implemented.

The Welsh Government said the health board accepted the review’s key findings and ‘we expect them to deliver those’.

Betsi Cadwaladr chief executive Carol Shillabeer said it was ‘determined to take action that improves services’.