A SENIOR nurse has admitted the care given to an elderly nursing home resident who died after being neglected was substandard, an inquest heard.

Stanley Bradford, 76, died three months after moving to Brithdir Nursing Home in New Tredegar, in 2005.

The former miner’s family said he was left looking like an inmate in a prisoner of war camp after suffering dehydration, malnourishment and pressure sores.

The father-of-five moved to Brithdir in June 2005 and died on September 29 that year with experts concluding the standard of care he received was “negligent”.

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An inquest in Newport is hearing evidence into the deaths of seven residents of the care home between 2003 and 2005.

Brithdir was closed in 2006, with owner Dr Prana Das dying before he stood trial accused of care failings.

Giving evidence Philip McCaffrey, who worked as a nurse-matron at the home from June 2005 to January 2006, said: “I would have to agree our standard of care was not acceptable.”

Assistant coroner Geraint Williams asked: “The suggestion is that you or your nursing colleagues were negligent in your care of Mr Bradford. Would you accept that?”

Mr McCaffrey replied: “Negligent is a strong word but I guess we were bordering on being negligent.

“I always intended to do my very best to provide every resident the best care possible and obviously because of the pressure we were under, how relentless it was, I wasn’t able to achieve my goals.

“It was never any intention of not giving the best possible care to the residents.”

Mr Bradford’s family said he deteriorated rapidly during the short time he lived at Brithdir and they rarely saw staff feed him or give him drinks.

Mr McCaffrey told the inquest: “I think it was a systematic failure of the system and I think we all had a part to play in it.

“The staffing situation was dire and you couldn’t be in two places at the same time.

“It was a terrible situation with no staff, and worse than that, I was frequently on my own in the home when there should have been two registered nurses on duty.

“The pressure was relentless from the moment you went on duty to the moment you left duty.”

Mr McCaffrey qualified as a nurse in 1960 but had spent the majority of his career in hospital management until he retired in the mid-1990s.

He came out of retirement in 2002 after Dr Das asked him to manage a series of nursing homes he owned, culminating in a short spell at Brithdir.

Mr McCaffrey described his knowledge of caring for the elderly as “extremely limited” and said he was “thrown in at the deep end” when he started there.

“There were times when I knew I was failing the residents because of the dire situation I found myself in,” he said.

“I had come to the conclusion they would have been worse off if it had not have been me because there would have been nobody there.

“It was just a very challenging situation where you didn’t know what to do for the best. I was very unhappy with the general standard of care in the home.”

Asked why he did not report his concerns to authorities, he replied: “To the best of my knowledge the Care Inspectorate Wales visited the home on a frequent basis, and they knew what the situation was.

“They certainly knew I was working on my own quite a lot of the time.”

The inquest is also looking at the deaths of former Brithdir residents Stanley James, 89, June Hamer, 71, Edith Evans, 85, Evelyn Jones, 87, and William Hickman, 71.

A hearing into the death of a seventh resident, Matthew Higgins, 86, will be held following the conclusion of the other six.