Church and State blog: Chelsea and Westminster Hospital: Declan is hospitalised with pneumonia and discharged unwell back into the streets no more than 42 hours after admission

Thursday, December 21, 2006

Chelsea and Westminster Hospital: Declan is hospitalised with pneumonia and discharged unwell back into the streets no more than 42 hours after admission

An hour and a half after my previous blog post yesterday afternoon, Declan was discharged unwell from Chelsea and Westminster Hospital back into the streets in freezing weather and dense fog - no more than 42 hours after admission to the hospital for pneumonia.

The discharge report states that Declan's admission on Monday night, 18 December, was due to "Interstitial Pneumonia". It further states that he was admitted "... with cough and shortness of breath. Felt feverish with no sweats. Productive cough for 4/7 with brown sputum. Chest pain, worse on breathing, worse on inspiration. Has not been eating due to lack of finance. No loss of appetite, no weight loss. Did have episode of loss of consciousness, witnessed by partner." His loss of consciousness occurred on Sunday at 7.00am, whilst he vomited all over his clothes on a bus. He could have easily died had I not been with him.

We believe Declan's pneumonia was brought on by two things. The first thing was a virus he contracted from one of the 30 homeless guys he shares a floor with at night; since last Friday, we have been sleeping in rolling shelters run by the West London Churches Homeless Concern (WLCHC) across two West London boroughs. The second was stress. We couldn't afford the luxury of resting and taking it easy over the weekend after a court clerk left out of Judge Walker's order of 11 December that we were granted leave to appeal his decision not to allow us apply for a judicial review against the Department for Work and Pensions. Declan had to file against the order we were given by 4.00pm on Monday - having been given three days upon receipt of the order to do so - or risk having his case dismissed because he had not filed within seven days of the date the order was made.

Last night, having been discharged from hospital, Declan was too unwell to eat the meal the rolling shelter provided; on Wednesdays, we sleep in a makeshift shelter at the back of the Catholic Holy Trinity Church in Brook Green. Instead, he went straight into his sleeping bag, coughing non-stop to the understandable annoyance of some who were eating. For us, it's not at all inconceivable that he was discharged earlier than he should have been because the Metropolitan Police and/or the secret services were in some way involved. When he was discharged yesterday at 2.30pm, we knew immediately that we had to find some way of getting out of the freezing cold and dense fog for as much of the afternoon as possible - in an area we were unfamiliar with - before taking two buses to the next shelter for the night. We must get to each shelter before 8.00pm or we don't get in and our names go to the bottom of the long list of people who want to get in on WLCHC's winter shelter programme.

We wonder what sort of reputation Chelsea and Westminster Hospital would have if everyone with serious respiratory illness was discharged from the hospital so unwell. We can only hope there will be no major setbacks and it's relatively downhill from here, the winter weather and being homeless notwithstanding.

From My Picks:

12 July 2019: Threat to life: Updated complaint to the United Nations under Article 19 (freedom of expression) of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. Mayor of London-commissioned St Mungo's highlighted

'Let me recommend an important web site churchandstate.org.uk. Operating out of London this well-designed and exciting web site covers church-state, population, climate change and other issues. Check it out.' Edd Doerr, President, Americans for Religious Liberty

Church and State

MAYOR OF LONDON RSI PROPERTY
DAY 406 IN A WEEKLY PERIODIC TENANCY
SUBJECT TO A SECTION 21 NOTICE

(SEE PARA. 3 BELOW)

1. Our 308 Honorary Associates include 20 Nobel Prize laureates. Declan and I are engaged in a project that deals with the publication of issues significant to social policy in a number of key areas, e.g., climate change, population, futurism, atheism, and free speech. Established as Network for Church Monitoring, a non-profit company limited by guarantee, our main publication, found at the website, Church and State, calls attention to subjects, not the least which have been critical of the interaction between religious and secular institutions. We have been the target of numerous threats and actions, e.g., the former resulting in threats to Declan's life, and the latter, which have led to vandalism. The various incidents are on record with the police and other official agencies.

2. There are no less than 63 Nobel Prize laureates on the Church and State website from 20 Honorary Associates, eight articles, nine book excerpts and 33 petition signatories. (For example, one Nobel laureate signed our Nobel petition in support of human embryonic stem cell research and gave us permission to excerpt from one of his books.) Our list of associates also includes 18 US National Medal laureates, and six Turing Award laureates (the equivalent of the Nobel Prize in computer science). We have published one article and excerpted from the books of seven members of the British House of Lords. And there are 31 knighted professors on the site from 13 Honorary Associates, one book excerpt and 21 petition signatories. These figures are despite the never-ending assault on our email (this link reveals the targeting of our emails to, among others, a close colleague in Washington, DC as well as space advocates and Nobel laureates).

3. This is Day 406 for us living under the threat to life of a 'no fault' eviction by Peabody Trust.[1] We live in a Mayor of London's Rough Sleepers Initiative (RSI) property. Peabody's appalling new terms of tenancy have forced us into an unstable weekly periodic tenancy that poses a threat to Declan's life and inhibits our ability to exercise our rights. Declan accumulated quite a history with the Housing Ombudsman Service before he received the Ombudsman's decision not to investigate a referral from Lyn Brown MP on jurisdictional grounds. The Ombudsman was asked to consider whether or not our tenancy has been renewed like for like; and whether, if not, it should be in light of the landlord having accused us of not signing a like-for-like agreement. The Equality and Human Rights Commission will not accept a referral of discrimination from Ms Brown, the Commission's helpline (EASS) having grossly distorted the complaint against Peabody. We no longer have pro se access to the courts (see next paragraph).

4. This eviction matter came before District Judge Ruth Fine at the Central London County Court on 30 June 2020, when both counsel for St Mungo's (the charity in effective control of our tenancy) and Declan presented their positions. Declan lost the case and was ordered to pay £1,850 in costs. A publishing colleague in America cleared these costs within 24 hours of my blog post about this hearing for strike out on a related issue that was the essence of the claim, i.e., that St Mungo's would take a phone call to confirm that we are clients of the Mayor of London's RSI programme. Within a week of the hearing, St Mungo's had agreed to take this phone call for us both, the Court having ruled that they were not obliged to do so despite our circumstances. This time we escaped bankruptcy (counsel for St Mungo's asked for £3,407.50 in costs), but consider that to seek pro se access to justice in the courts has become far too dangerous for us. Declan currently has before the Parliamentary and Health Service Ombudsman the decision of the Information Commissioner that allows St Mungo's to continue processing coercive support plans without our knowledge or consent and that also poses a threat to his life.

5. When it comes to traffic, we have had 10.7 million hits in the past three years on Facebook; however, I left the platform on 13 March 2021 for one year rather than risk being banned for life. It is indisputable that with any sort of level playing field Church and State would have far exceeded 2.5 million hits last year. In addition to a large variety of blocks without explanation, Facebook had so severely restricted our Page's distribution by October 2020 that it was almost as good as an unpublished page.[2] Currently, we are up to their 85th block since 1 December 2015, and as usual without an explanation. This block records as one half of their 3rd double block in the first five weeks of this year that lasted 60 days. Our traffic has also been curtailed by over 2.5K blocks on access to Church and State since 26 July 2016, including 29 full distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks since 17 May 2019 that have lasted for as long as 54 hours at a time.[3] About 70% of our hits are from Americans.

"This is precisely the hard hitting kind of response needed to clarify the unfair way Facebook is treating your highly reputable site." Don Collins, Founder, International Services Assistance Fund, Washington DC

Last updated: 26/06/21

_________________________

[1] Once a fixed term has elapsed, the landlord has the option to seek eviction even if the tenant has upheld their obligations in full (though of course the landlord must still apply for and obtain a county court order).

[2] 17/10/20: We have permission to publish this ISAF letter of 30 September to Facebook COO Sheryl Samberg. Facebook has so severely restricted our Page's distribution since 4 September that it's almost as good as an unpublished page

[3] Since October 2019, we have been defining a full DDoS attack as having such a high volume of up to 4-minute blocks on access to Church and State that we don't bother recording them all.

Church and State blog

Thursday, December 21, 2006

Chelsea and Westminster Hospital: Declan is hospitalised with pneumonia and discharged unwell back into the streets no more than 42 hours after admission

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