GRIEVING daughter Sue Snethlage believes the care her mum received at a home in Trowbridge contributed to her death.

Now she is preparing a dossier for the Care Quality Commission about how 92-year-old Eileen Davies suffered at the The Wingfield Care Home in Trowbridge in the ten days before her death.

Mrs Snethlage said she was shocked with what she found when she visited her parents after they moved into the home in Wingfield Road 10 days before her mother died on May 27.

She says she found urine-soaked carpets, inattentive staff who were calling her mum, who had mild dementia, by the wrong Christian name and had not attended properly to her incontinent father Jim’s sore bottom, and, most worrying, a broken handrail in her parents’ en-suite bathroom which may have caused her mother to fall.

The home was rated as ‘requiring improvement’ by the CQC earlier this year.

On Wednesday Mrs Snethlage learned a post mortem examination showed her mother, who had lived in Hilperton for almost 50 years and was well known locally, had died of natural causes.

“I feel their lack of care has contributed to her death,” the retired primary school teacher, 67, who lives in Warminster, said.

“She died of arteriosclerosis brought on by hypertension. I know she did not like it there and that would have put her blood pressure up.”

She asked the coroner’s office for the post mortem examination because she was worried about the fall Mrs Davies had four days before she died. She said: “I went in with a friend, and in the bathroom there was a rail off the wall, and one of the nurses said it would be attended to, and that mum had had a fall in the bathroom that morning.

“I was not sure if that meant she had had a fall because the rail had come off the wall. They did not say that, but of course I wondered what had happened.”

Mrs Davies’s dementia meant that when her daughter asked her about it, the 92-year-old had no memory of falling at all, let alone exactly what had happened.

Mrs Snethlage did not organise her parents’ move to the Memory Lane dementia wing of The Wingfield, and says she would never have chosen the home, although she accepts they had become too unwell to live at home with carers as they had done for some years. And she said the home’s care was not all bad, with her 95-year-old father enjoying the food. She was pleased his appetite, which had been a concern, was improving.

But she is so angry at the way her mother died she has already made an initial complaint to the CQC and is now compiling a detailed report, based on notes she made after her visits, for them.

“She should never have died in circumstances like that, with stinking carpets and handrails falling off the wall,” she said. “There was less care in that home than there was at home.

“I want to warn people to choose homes with great care. Check the CQC reports, make an impromptu visit, see more than one care home. Overlook this advice at your peril, or you like me could find your loved one passing away in less than satisfactory circumstances.”

A spokesman for The Wingfield said: “We take the comments seriously and always want to continually improve, however this opinion does not reflect the positive feedback we have received from residents and their families. The health and wellbeing of our residents is at the forefront of everything we do at The Wingfield and this – as always – will be our priority moving forward.”

Wiltshire Coroner’s office confirmed yesterday (Thursday) that following the post mortem result, no inquest would be held into Mrs Davies’ death.