A FORMER nurse has branded the standard of care she received at the Royal Blackburn Hospital ‘dreadful’.

Joan Dawson, 80, worked on wards at Burnley General Hospital for more than 50 years.

But the pensioner said she was shocked by modern day standards when she was admitted to Blackburn.

She claims nurses failed to clean her ward of another patient's diarrhoea and vomit, and that the environment affected her recovery from a minor heart attack.

Mrs Dawson said: “There were four of us, most of us between 70 and 90, on one ward.

"One lady was ill with diarrhoea. She had been sick going to the toilet and back to her bed.

“It wasn't cleaned properly until after she was taken to an isolation ward.

“They came and washed all the walls and around her bed, but they didn't do our side of the ward or the toilet.

“I said to one nurse that it should be put down that it hadn't been done yet, but she just said it was alright.

"When you think all it's cost for that hospital to be built and, to be quite honest with you, it's dirty."

The grandmother first went into hospital on February 17 with chest pains. She was re-admitted on March 2 and spent nearly three weeks on wards C1 and B18 before she was discharged on March 20.

Mrs Dawson said she had to ask nurses to be bathed and had to use pillows passed on from other patients because no clean pillow cases were available.

And Mrs Dawson, whose husband Jerry was awarded a British Empire Medal for his work on ambulances, said nurses at the hospital needed better leadership.

She said: “They have got good staff there, but things are just not followed through.

“You shouldn't have to say to people what should be cleaned. It's dreadful.

“When you've worked as a nurse it upsets you. You know how it should be done and it's not done as it should be.

“It's good staff going to rack and ruin.”

Mrs Dawson's grandson Phil Piper, 33, who visited her with his wife Denise, 36, said it 'wasn't fair' that she had to put up with such standards.

He said: “It was horrible. You could smell it before you even got to the ward.

"Why they ever closed Burnley down I don't know.

"It's not fair that people have to put up with that."

Beverley Aspin, lead matron for infection prevention and control at East Lancashire Hospitals NHS Trust, said the trust could not comment in detail on Mrs Dawson’s case for confidentiality reasons.

She said: “We are sorry that Mrs Dawson feels that her care was not of the high standard we strive to provide for all of our patients, and would be happy to discuss the concerns raised by her and her family with them at any time.”

Coun Roy Davies, Blackburn's health watchdog, said: "I think obviously what that lady must do is put a complaint in.

"Then the allegations she is making can be looked at by the hospital and Patient Advice and Liaison Services.

"If what we are doing is wrong then it's wrong, and we have got to get it right."