THE SHOCKING report into the neglect of our elderly could not have spelt it out more plainly.

In many instances the National Health Service, the body they have paid into all their lives and which was once held up as an international treasure, is failing to meet the most basic standards of care for our oldest citizens.

Ombudsman Ann Abraham has highlighted ten cases, all equally distressing, as a representation of everything she has discovered.

She speaks of an elderly lady left in Southampton General who was not bathed or showered in the 13 weeks before her death.

And of a pensioner left in Bolton hospital who was so dehydrated he could not speak, despite being in the final, painful stages of cancer.

Ealing hospital dumped an elderly man in a waiting room for three hours while his wife died a few rooms away, denying him the chance to say goodbye.

Predictably and shamefully this cruelty has been explained away as down to ‘the cuts’ or a lack of staff.

Well it isn’t. All these incidences took place at a time when cash was being pumped into the NHS and well before David Cameron started swinging his axe.

The truth is even more unpalatable, that there may be a small minority of nurses – those for whom caring should be in their DNA – who don’t give a monkey’s about old patients.

They feel that helping elderly men to the toilet, taking the time to wipe saliva from a pensioner’s face, or washing frail old bodies is beneath them.

They appear to think their university degrees and their ‘practitioner in their own right’ nonsense, somehow absolves them from the most important procedure of all – caring for the sick.

Yet, in the end, that is what we are paying them for.

No one can save a human body riddled with cancer for whom death is only a matter of time. All the degrees in the world won’t help the person drifting in and out of consciousness on their death bed.

But nurses can ensure these people – who used to be young and bright, just like them – can die peacefully and with dignity.

On and off over the past few years I’ve visited quite a few relatives in various hospitals across the country.

I’ve seen blood, or worse, smeared on the rails of beds. I’ve clocked midwives stuffing their faces with biscuits while a friend was quietly weeping in her bed, sick and ill after a disastrous delivery, her baby still spattered with blood two days after his birth.

Before I get a load of nurses and health professionals writing in to say they’re not like that, I’ll say this: I know. The vast majority aren’t, thank goodness. But as many nurses in their 40s and 50s will tell you – and as this report shows – standards appear to have gone down.

As Katherine Murphy of the Patients Association says: “Older patients need to be treated with respect and compassion, not as an inconvenience.”

But that’s how many hospitals appear to regard them. How often is the hateful term ‘bed-blockers’ used against the people who have funded the NHS for most of their natural?

How often are we told the elderly are ‘consuming resources’, as if all the teenage drunks, idiot girls who fall off their stilettos, drug addicts and the morbidly obese are not costing us a penny?

Yes, money is vital to the health service. But all the money in the word won’t buy compassion and human decency.

Just as there are rubbish journalists, useless teachers and incompetent pilots, we now have to accept that there are some nurses who should be kicked out of the profession.

And can we start with those too selfish or dim-witted to notice that a human being is dying of thirst on their own ward?