PATIENTS are facing a lottery of care on hospital wards because of workload pressures facing nursing staff.

Ten recent complaints where patients and relatives found standards of basic care unacceptable were reported last week to Maidstone and Tunbridge Wells NHS Trust, board meeting.

Director of nursing Bernard Place revealed how pressures in both emergency and elective wards continued to exert a "deleterious impact on standards of nursing care".

It comes at a crunch time for the trust as Government changes give patients more choice over which hospital they use. Services could be threatened if patients look elsewhere for treatment.

Over the past 12 months the trust received 678 complaints from patients and relatives concerned at quality of care.

The figure was only a slight improvement on the 713 complaints investigated by the trust in 2003/04.

The examples presented to managers in public last week included that of a husband whose wife was advised by a nurse to wet herself because she was too busy to take her to the toilet.

Another woman had her groin examined by a nurse in full view of patients and visitors on her ward.

A daughter complained after her mother’s faeces-stained nightie was left forgotten in the ward washroom for four days in a green hospital bag.

Mr Place said the examples, from Maidstone Hospital, the Kent and Sussex in Tunbridge Wells and Pembury, illustrated shortcomings in nursing care and what needed to be done.

Mr Place said problems were not caused by a lack of staff or resources but by basic standards of care not being followed on some wards.

"What is important are the core components of care dealing with how patients are spoken to, going to the toilet, hygiene and so on," he said.

There were 45 wards across the trust and a lot had solid leadership and very high standards.

"What we need to focus on now is bringing the whole trust up to the same standard."

A spokesman for NHS patient and public forums in Maidstone and Tunbridge Wells, said forum members were as disturbed as the trust board by the report, adding that chief executive Rose Gibb had said the trust wanted to bring these complaints into the open. "We support this as an initial step towards solving underlying problems in patient care."