My dad was 81. He had motor neurone disease, but if you'd spoken to him, you wouldn't have known it. His mind was sharp, he was still writing, still walking every day. The issue was never his mind. It was his balance.
He'd had a few falls, and one of them was serious, a skull fracture. So when the doctors suggested keeping him in hospital for observation, our family agreed without hesitation. It felt like the safe decision. He had private health insurance, his whole life. You assume that means he'll be looked after, properly, carefully, humanly.
He was placed in a shared room, right near the nurses' station, with a large glass observation window. It was meant to be a monitored room. Because he was a known falls risk, the hospital also assigned a nurse special, someone whose sole job was to sit with him at night and watch.
A few nights in, he did fall. But it was witnessed. The nurse was there. Help came immediately. That's what the system is supposed to do, and for a moment, I saw it working.
Then, the night before he died, they removed the nurse special. Nothing about his risk had changed. He was still a falls risk. Still trying to get up on his own. Still stubborn.
That night, he was checked, obs done, tucked in, and left. At some point he got out of bed. The bed alarm didn't go off. There was no one at the nurses' station, right outside the window. No one saw him. No one heard him. He lay there for hours. We don't know if he pressed the call button. All we know is what the records show, there were hours between his last check and the moment they found him and called a code blue. By then, it was too late. He had a severe brain injury, unsurvivable.
We got the call in the early hours. Not "come see how he's doing." Come say goodbye.
What stays with me isn't just that he died. It's how it happened. He was going to fall again eventually, that part wasn't avoidable. But this fall didn't have to go unwitnessed and unnoticed, for hours, in a monitored room, right next to a nurses' station.
I want to be clear about something. This isn't about blaming the nurses who cared for him. They were doing their best, and you could feel that. This is about the system around them, the structure, the staffing, the processes that failed at the exact moment they were needed most.
My dad didn't die because of his condition. He died because the systems meant to protect him didn't. That's the part I can't let go of.
If someone you love is in a monitored room right now
I'm not a clinician, and I'm not telling you what to do. But these are the things I wish I'd understood at the time, and the one thing I'd say to anyone in this position now.
You're allowed to ask. Ask directly whether a "nurse special" or one-to-one observation is in place, and ask to be told, not assumed, if that ever changes. Ask what actually triggers a bed alarm, and what doesn't. Ask what "monitored" really means in that specific room, because a window and a nearby desk aren't the same as someone watching.
And here's the part that took me longer to understand. Noticing something doesn't mean blaming the nurse in front of you. From everything I've seen since, the nurses themselves are often run off their feet, stretched across more patients than feels safe, and carrying pressure that has nothing to do with how much they care. They're not the ones who decide staffing levels or write the policies. Speaking up isn't about making their job harder, it's often the opposite, it's the only way the people above them ever find out something needs to change.
So if something feels off, even something small, say it. Ask who you say it to. And if you can, ask for it to be written down, not just spoken in a corridor, because what gets documented is what eventually has a chance of reaching someone with the power to actually fix it. A quiet word disappears. A note in a file doesn't.
None of this guarantees anything. It didn't for us. But you noticing, and saying so, calmly, clearly, on the record, is one of the only things actually within your control in a moment like that.
I know my story isn't unique. And that's exactly why we're doing this.
– Belinda Scott, Founder of NAVO