Patients starve and die of thirst on hospital wards

• as well as 43 people who starved to death, 287 people were recorded by doctors as being malnourished when they died in hospitals;
• there were 558 cases where doctors recorded that a patient had died in a state of severe dehydration in hospitals;
• 78 hospital and 39 care home patients were killed by bedsores, while a further 650 people who died had their presence noted on their death certificates;
• 21,696 were recorded as suffering from septicemia when they died, a condition which experts say is most often associated with infected wounds.
The records, from the Office for National Statistics, follow a series of scandals of care of the elderly, with doctors forced to prescribe patients with drinking water or put them on drips to make sure they do not become severely dehydrated .