A hospital trust will have to pay damages after a patient who had undergone a successful operation for cancer was then inadvertently starved and poisoned to death.

Roy Hodgson, 66, a retired pub landlord, underwent a surgical operation to remove a tumour in his throat at the Cumberland Infirmary, in Carlisle, and was given a good chance of making a full recovery.

But he suffered weeks of starvation after a nurse failed to insert a feeding tube correctly into his stomach, and senior medical staff failed to spot the mistake.

Mr Hodgson, a father of three grown-up children who ran the Three Tuns pub in Cleator, West Cumbria, for 20 years, suffered such hunger pangs that he attempted to flee the hospital and was discovered near its entrance clutching his stomach.

It emerged at his inquest that several days after his operation on October 16, 2004, the feeding tube came out and the nurse put it back in the wrong place. A radiologist who examined a scan of the area did not spot the error.

When nurses fed him through the tube with liquid nourishment, they were effectively poisoning him. He died two weeks later after developing peritonitis.

At the time Karen Hodgson, his daughter, described how her father kept asking for something to eat and drink, and showing them how swollen his stomach was. He would have to write notes to explain his hunger.

She said: “A couple of days before he went back into intensive care, the nurses found him in the hospital foyer with his coat on, crouched by the wall and holding his stomach.”

The National Health Service Litigation Authority, which handles major claims against NHS hospitals, has written to the family’s lawyer confirming that the trust accepts medical negligence. There is yet to be an assessment of the level of damages.

Markus Nickson, the family’s solicitor, said that the hospital had admitted that staff failed to give Mr Hodgson the care he needed and that he died as a result. He said: “What Mr Hodgson and his family have gone through was appalling.”

The hospital, part of the North Cumbria Acute Hospitals NHS Trust, has insisted that it has learnt the lessons of Mr Hodgson’s death. The hospital has changed its protocols and any reinsertion of a feeding tube is now only carried out by specialist staff.

Mark Hodgson, 28, the dead man’s son, said that the family had not pursued legal action for the money but said that they did not want a similar thing happening to anyone else.

He said: “We have been told that they have changed the procedure nationwide. That is the best thing we could have got from this.”

Mr Hodgson, an electrical engineer, described his father as a happy, outgoing and caring man who had every hope of a recovery.

“What happened was an absolute disgrace,” he said. “We wanted justice. We had no idea that he was not being fed properly.”

The family’s grief was compounded at the time by having to leave the pub that was also their home. They said that the brewery had asked them to leave if they could not open the pub for business. The family, which was running the pub, were forced to raise money through a garage sale of their possessions. Mr Nickson said: “Not only did they lose a loved father because of a ghastly mistake, they were told by the brewery which owned the pub that they would have to get out within a week.”

At the inquest last November, John Taylor, the Coroner for West Cumbria, concluded that Mr Hodgson had died as a result of an accident.

The coroner was assured by medical staff that procedures at the hospital had been changed in the light of the patient’s death.

Feeding tubes are no longer put in after surgery, but between diagnosis and the start of any treatment. Nurses would no longer reinsert feeding tubes so soon after an operation when the hole in a patient’s stomach was not properly established.

A spokesman for the hospital trust was unable to comment.

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