Heart attack patient on hospital bed told to attend work placement scheme

A heart attack patient who was recovering on his hospital bed received a telephone call, as he lay hooked up to machines, advising him that he must attend a government-led work placement scheme, it has been reported.

Colin Rogers, 58, from Irby in Merseyside, was admitted to hospital after suffering chest pains on 27 September and later had to go undergo a quadruple heart bypass, the Liverpool Echo reports.

However, despite his wife Carol alerting the Job Centre to his situation and asking them to pass these details on, the firm that undertakes the government’s Work Programme scheme, A4e, did not receive this communication, called and reportedly urged him to attend.

It had been a call scheduled two months previously, A4e says, adding that it wasn’t alerted to the fact that Mr Rogers had been hospitalised and that when it was, no further contact was made.

Mr Rogers described the person on the phone as being persistent, which is when he then ended the conversation and “put the phone down”.

He added he was “disgusted” with the lack of communication, while Carol said it was not good for her husband to get stressed.

A spokesperson for A4e told The Independent: “[We] had not been directly informed that Mr Rogers was seriously ill before we made the call to him, and we could not have known he was in hospital.

“The conversation was very brief and as soon as we realised Mr Rogers was in hospital, we ended the call. All the correct procedures were followed, and no further contact has been made.

“Our advisor apologised profusely at the time. We wish Mr Rogers a full recovery and are obviously sorry that this has caused him distress, even though we had no way of knowing that he was ill or in hospital when we called at the pre-arranged time.”

The incident comes days after a coalition of charities found that thousands of patients with degenerative and progressive diseases are having their benefits cut because the government believes they’ll recover enough to look for work.

Many of the sufferers, including those with Parkinson's and MS, are being denied full Employment Support Allowance and have been assessed as suitable for work-related activity – which means they should prepare for the workplace – and later face having their benefits removed altogether as an “incentive” to find a job, despite suffering from an illness that only worsens with time.

Steve Ford, Chief Executive at Parkinson’s UK, said: “To set up a system which tells people who’ve had to give up work because of a debilitating, progressive condition that they’ll recover, is humiliating and nothing short of a farce.

“These nonsensical decisions are a prime example of how benefits assessors lack even the most basic levels of understanding of the conditions they are looking at.”