Having totally failed to ensure that patients receive the level of care to which they are entitled, the Care Quality Commission is, if you will forgive the pun, adding insult to injury.

The latest idea by these highly-paid ‘experts’ is to get us hoi-polloi (ie patients and visitors) to report on conditions in hospitals.

By the way, this will include making unannounced visits at nights and weekends.

This is nothing but another buck-passing gimmick.

I first reported a case of patient neglect in a local hospital in 1993.

For reasons I have never been able to understand, the management were not prepared to do anything about it because I was not a relative.

So in that instance, an elderly lady continued to lie for hours in a urine-soaked bed.

Over the past 20 years both as inpatient, outpatient and visitor, I have drawn the hospitals’ management’s attention to numerous cases of negligence, abuse and/or downright carelessness.

On every occasion, all I got in return was a ubiquitous response from an official, saying that, having thoroughly investigated the matter, he/she had utmost confidence in their staff and was more than satisfied by the standard of nursing care on that ward.

Having read horrific reports of high death rates, ill-treatment and poor hygiene in the NHS, it would appear that some hospital officials have a vastly different view of standards of nursing care than the rest of us.

D Walker, Barrowford.