99 year-old grandmother left on hospital stretcher for 64 hours waiting for a bed

A 99-year-old woman from France was left on an emergency room stretcher for 64 hours, her granddaughter has revealed.

Aline Percher, who lives in Rouen, said her grandmother Claire had been taken to the Charles-Nicolle University Hospital on 17 October for acute pulmonary edema, or fluid on the lungs.

The pensioner, who Ms Percher affectionately refers to as Manou, spent the next 64 hours lying on an uncomfortable stretcher while she waited for a bed. She was admitted on Friday evening, but was not given a bed until Monday afternoon.

The situation got even worse when the family were told that there were not enough meals for the patients.

In a post published on Facebook, Ms Percher recounted details of the painstaking 64 hours that her grandmother spend on the stretcher.

Recording her grandmother’s condition after the first 48 hours, she wrote: “I’m keeping an eye on your heels, they’re getting red. Mom gave me a few things, I’m massaging your heels and putting down a pressure relief cushion. I’m helping the caregivers change you, because they’re overwhelmed.”

She added: “While changing you, we notice that you’re starting to get quite red. They’re putting cream on you, but you really need a bed with a proper mattress… But they’re out, so we’re going to put a mattress topper on your stretcher… It’s better than nothing.”

Ms Percher said the nurses and staff at the hospital were very apologetic for the extremely long wait for a bed and the difficult conditions the elderly woman had been kept in. She said of the caregivers: “It’s not your fault, you’re doing your best, you take care of her the way you can.”

When her grandmother finally got a bed in a geriatric ward at 2.30pm on Monday 20 October, she gave her granddaughter “a feeble smile, but a smile that tells [her] you are better”.

At the end of her post, she called on France’s president Emmanuel Macron and the minister of health, Stéphanie Ris, to “wake up”, saying they could be in the same position one day.

The University Hospital said in a statement to Le Parisien: “During the weekend of October 17, the adult emergency department had to deal with very intense activity, with more than 250 visits per day, in the midst of a seasonal epidemic surge.

“At the same time, the pressure on available beds at the Rouen University Hospital and in local facilities was particularly high. This situation unfortunately generated an abnormally long wait in the emergency department for patients requiring hospitalisation after their initial visit.”