A vulnerable Alzheimer’s patient was deprived of her life savings after NHS officials “cut and pasted” details from other patients’ files in an attempt to claim she did not qualify.
Hilda Bowler, who was 92 when she died in 2020, was refused tens of thousands of pounds for care.
Now NHS Lincolnshire Integrated Care Board (ICB) has been forced to repay her bereaved family after it emerged it had carried out flawed assessments, including using details of other patients’ cases.
One sentence used in an official report to describe Mrs Bowler’s health had been copied from a male patient’s records and referred to her as a man.
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In another paragraph, NHS assessors pasted in a line which stated the patient had “attended and fully participated in the [in-person care needs] assessment” – when this was clearly not applicable to Mrs Bowler, who was unable to speak or consent to a meeting.
Her son-in-law Steve Panton, 77, a journalist who formerly ran radio stations for the BBC, accused officials of presiding over a “shocking ‘cut and paste’ culture”.
He said: “I was staggered to discover that they were simply lifting passages from reports written about total strangers and including them in Hilda’s report. It was so blatant.”
Under the NHS’s Continuing Healthcare (CHC) scheme, the NHS should fully fund the care of all patients who need nursing care primarily for medical conditions, such as advanced dementia, Parkinson’s or stroke, rather than solely because they are frail or elderly.
The funding is not means-tested and is distinct from adult social care provided by councils.
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But The Telegraph has previously revealed how health officials have made concerted attempts to cut spending on CHC, despite it being a legal right for thousands of patients.
Mrs Bowler, a mother of two, had been a full-time worker running a transport café before she retired in her 60s.
She began developing symptoms of Alzheimer’s in her 80s and first moved into residential care before being transferred to a nursing home in 2018, aged 90, as her condition deteriorated.
At this point, her family applied for CHC but the first assessment in November 2018 found her ineligible. Assessors concluded her care needs only ticked one eligibility criteria box out of a possible 11. At least two ticks are required for a patient to be eligible for funding.
Having spotted errors and the cut-and-pasted sections in the report, her family demanded another assessment but this also came to the same conclusion.
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They then went through a “gruelling ordeal” of being repeatedly dismissed in a series of reviews before an independent assessment in June 2023 concluded Mrs Bowler should have been assessed from the start as having ticked eight criteria boxes and that she had always been eligible for funding.
“It is an utter disgrace that when she was at her most vulnerable, and in the grip of this terrible disease, the NHS tried to deny her the financial support that we have now proved she was entitled to,” Mr Panton said.
“The whole process was shambolic. It wears you down and it makes it very hard for families to get closure after someone has died when this is hanging over you.”
During their lengthy battle, the family received a letter in November 2020 from Lincolnshire ICB’s associate director of nursing in which she admitted assessors had been using pre-filled assessment forms, which they were supposed to amend with the correct details – but said this practice had since been stopped.
As well as repaying the family “tens of thousands” in care costs, the Lincolnshire ICB has since also agreed to pay the family a separate four-figure compensation payment for mishandling their case.
Hundreds more eligible
Mr Panton believes hundreds of other patients who may have had other people’s details copied into their reports may be eligible to demand new assessments – and could be in line for compensation.
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“[The rulebook] states that assessments have to be ‘thorough and accurate’. Cribbing material from other reports falls far short of this requirement,” he said. “Any report cobbled together in this way must surely be invalid.”
He emphasised that the family had not wanted to share details of Mrs Bowler’s condition publicly but had felt compelled to do so to warn other families applying for CHC about the “scandalous practice”.
A spokesman for NHS Lincolnshire Integrated Care Board said: “We have been in regular contact with the Bowler family regarding this matter since concerns were first shared six years ago.
“In order to address these, NHS England firstly undertook a review and the ICB commissioned an additional review by an independent body to ensure impartiality.
“We fully accepted that the family should have received a different service from us, and we remain sorry this did not happen originally. We have corrected processes to avoid any repeat of this experience, both in terms of improvements to our service and by remedying the financial impact for the family involved.
“Whilst this case has now been closed, we would again like to express our apologies to the family for this matter.”
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