Cambridgeshire care home boss ‘bullied patients’

A MANAGER at a Cambridgeshire care home has been accused of bullying and neglecting patients.

John Mitchell-Whiteford has appeared at a disciplinary hearing in London facing seven charges – including one relating to an allegation that he stepped over a patient who had fallen to the floor and left her there without help for 90 minutes.

It has also been claimed at the proceedings, brought by the Nursing and Midwifery Council, that patients’ rooms were left cold and unclean.

The incidents are alleged to have taken place at the Drey House Nursing Home in St Neots.

Carol Porter, the patient’s daughter, wept as she described the treatment her mother received from 50-year-old Mr Mitchell-Whiteford.

Mrs Porter, of Duddenhoe End, Saffron Walden, said she arrived to find her 90-year-old mother, who suffered from Alzheimer’s, disoriented, unclean and freezing cold in a room with windows open.

She said: “I wasn’t happy. She didn’t look well. She looked as if she was fading away, she seemed malnourished.

“She was very thin and frail and a draught on an elderly person is not good.

“All I wanted to do was get her out of there.”

Allegations against Mr Mitchell-Whiteford date back to March 2002 when the then Weald House was taken over by Altruism Ltd and Mitchell-Whiteford was made clinical manager.

He denies the claims.

Mr Mitchell-Whiteford said he was confronted by a campaign of “sabotage” by old staff disgruntled with the shake-up which had been designed to improve poor standards.

Mr Mitchell-Whiteford said: “One felt as if one was walking into a war zone. The people who were working there were almost exclusively negative and there were incidents over the coming three or four weeks which led one to believe the two groups of staff could not be integrated.”

The mental health nurse is also accused of confiscating a stick from a woman he knew needed it to walk, shouting at a patient who wished to remain in her room at meal times and walking over the same patient when she fell.

Mr Mitchell-Whiteford could be struck off if the committee finds against him.

The hearing, which began on Monday, March 30, has now been adjourned and is set to resume in September.