Nobody wants a close brush with death in a hospital, even someone else’s death. Patients enter hospital hoping for a cure or improvement — optimism is an essential key to recovery. Even the very ill need to believe they will come out alive, otherwise why undergo sometimes painful treatment away from home and family?

This explains the widespread revulsion at the body left for seven hours in a ward, uncovered, and propped up on pillows. The bed was curtained but patients could see what had happened. The poor man was visible between the curtains during visiting hours and right through two patient mealtimes.

Sharing a confined space with the dead might be unavoidable in the aftermath of a devastating earthquake, but not in an NHS hospital in Scotland’s largest city. The incident at Stobhill came to light because another patient complained, and rightly so. Hospital managers have apologised, but their excuses came nowhere near explaining the extent of the oversight.

According to NHS Greater Glasgow and Clyde, the man’s son had asked for his father’s body to remain on the ward until he returned from a business trip to pay his last respects. This was allowed, said the health board, because staff always consider the wishes of the bereaved. The corpse remained in place for another three hours after the son left, and thehospital accept a fault there.

That suggests managers considered it acceptable to leave the body in close proximity to other patients for four hours while the bereaved son flew back from London. Staff should have told the son, gently but firmly, that failing to move his father was not an option. Their compassion, if that is what it was, had a significant impact on the well-being of other patients, never mind the dignity of the dead man himself. One understands why the family would not wish to pay their last respects in a mortuary, but couldn’t a small anteroom be found for saying goodbye in private?

We are only aware of this incident because the complainant went public. Let’s hope it is an isolated misjudgement, but who knows how many corpses lie behind curtains as visitors arrive with grapes and good cheer for their sick friends and relatives?

What we do know is that health minister Nicola Sturgeon referred to a wider malaise when she commented on the story. She said the NHS has a problem with aspects of “non-clinical care”. It is now recognised that while medical treatment is improving, the less tangible experiences of a hospital stay — dignity, comfort and care — leave something to be desired. Even cancer care, an area prioritised by successive governments, apparently lacks the gentle touch. Stirling’s Cancer Care Research Centre reported last week that people with the disease felt isolated and disrespected because their emotional needs were neglected.

Attitudes towards a spell in hospital are often influenced by nurses. They ensure patients are comfortable and, as far as possible, content. Effective nursing keeps patients safe too. They die if things are dirty, as was brutally apparent in the Clostridium difficile (C difficile) outbreak at the Vale of Leven hospital earlier this year, where 55 were infected and 18 perished.

Sturgeon said conditions at the hospital were “appalling and completely unacceptable”, after reading the report into the outbreak. There was no leadership on infection control, poor hand hygiene and isolation facilities. Beds were too close together, accelerating the spread of the disease. There was inadequate management at ward level and further up the chain of command.

It is clear that the problems at Vale of Leven go right to the top, and were associated with the threat of closure and its effect on morale. But is low morale an excuse for neglect? While not letting senior management off the hook, we should ask whether poor “non-clinical” care might link to changes in modern nursing .

A previous health minister, Andy Kerr, gave senior ward nurses more responsibility for infection control back in 2005. It was a sound clinical decision, as well as basic common sense. So why hasn’t it worked? Some believe nurses shrug off responsibility for the basics because they consider themselves quasi-doctors, a trend encouraged by years of university training. Very senior nurse managers who exalt their own qualifications to justify executive salaries, set the direction for everyone in the profession.

These concerns were raised after the much worse outbreak of C difficile in Maidstone in England between 2004 and 2006. Patients were treated with contempt and left in their own dirt. Hospital managers got the blame — rightly — but the attitude of nurses was also questioned. Hugh Pennington, professor of bacteriology at Aberdeen University, said we had lost sight of what nurses do. “For many of them getting s*** on their hands and washing it off again is something to be left to the lowest of the low,” he said.

The solution is not to disempower nurses, but to elevate the status of their more traditional duties. Sturgeon accepted a review this summer that will transform senior charge nurses into real authority figures in hospitals by 2010. Great, if they become matrons whose word is law on spotless wards: no gossiping round the desk; no unwashed patients; no dead bodies left unattended. But the new matrons will be just another layer of bureaucracy unless their teams get the fundamentals right. To paraphrase the Royal College of Nursing’s own slogan, dignity should be what you do.

joan.mcalpine@sunday-times.co.uk

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