An angina sufferer claims she was forced to stop faulty hospital equipment falling apart after alarms sounded to tell nurses she was dead.

Sylvia Hickman, of Harwich, said she held wires linking her chest to a heart monitor for more than an hour because the machine's connections did not work properly.

The 57-year-old was taken ill at home with an angina attack and fever and rushed to Colchester General Hospital by ambulance.

Mrs Hickman, who has had angina for six years, said the first monitor she was attached to gave off an emergency alarm if she didn't hold a yellow lead between her fingers.

"I had to laugh about it because if I didn't I'd have cried, it was so ridiculous," she said.

"The monitor wouldn't stop making an alarm sound and a nurse came in and said 'Mrs Hickman, according to that heart monitor you're dead.'"

Mrs Hickman said she then waited an hour before being transferred to another cubicle, but leads had to be borrowed for the second heart monitor because its set was missing.

"The nurses and doctor were just so frustrated, poor devils, because they couldn't get on with their jobs properly because the alarm kept going off and they had to come and check it," she said.

"Luckily enough I wasn't seriously ill, but if someone had had a heart attack, or were older and didn't understand what was wrong, they wouldn't have been able to cope and it would have been very distressful for them."

A spokesman for Essex Rivers Healthcare said: "There was an issue with the first heart monitor but she was put on another one and the correct bits of wire were found and used."

"Equipment goes wrong. The important thing is we have back-up equipment and this was used."

Published Wednesday, April 23, 2003

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