‘I was at breaking point’: Carer highlights NHS failings after nursing dying ex-husband
Diane Edwards is exhausted and in mourning. She has agreed to speak to Sky News just 10 days after her ex-husband’s death.
She stands in the bathroom where they would spend hours through the night together as he battled stage 4 terminal bowel cancer.
“Sometimes I’d put him back into bed and the blood would be pouring out,” she says.
“It’s horrific. It isn’t the same person you knew or you were married to. They’re not the same people.”
Mick was blind and needed assistance moving around his home. He had been suffering for months and opportunities to diagnose his condition were missed.
After he was told he had cancer, carers and charity support staff would visit to help the family during the day but Diane says they were insufficient and lacked the medical training needed.
“They weren’t medical carers. He deteriorated even more and I was on my knees, I was at breaking point.
“The tears were rolling down my cheek, sometimes I didn’t know I was crying. I was worn out and I thought ‘if I don’t do something about myself, I’m going to end up in hospital’. I never slept. Your body gets used to no sleep.”
Mick Edwards
One year ago, complications in Mick’s condition meant he required hospital treatment.
This time he was discharged with a fast-track care package known as NHS Continuing Healthcare or CHC. It’s funded by the NHS for people assessed as having health and social care needs caused by a medical issue.
Around 12 weeks after leaving hospital, Mick was remotely assessed online by NHS Shropshire, Telford and Wrekin, which found he needed social care instead of palliative care.
Diane says Mick didn’t have any family present at this meeting, only staff from a care home who were now looking after him.
It left the family worried they would have to sell his home to pay for the palliative care they believed he needed.
“Mick couldn’t cope with a video link,” Diane says. “He’d lost his confidence, he’d had falls, he was deteriorating, so he couldn’t have coped.
“I had to tell Mick he’d lost his funding. He got upset over it. He didn’t eat for a day because of it. It’s hard, there’s nothing out there for you for help, there’s no backup, I wish there was.”
Diane and Mick Edwards on their wedding day
The Shropshire, Telford and Wrekin NHS Trust offered its sympathies and condolences to Mick’s family, telling Sky News its assessments are carried out in line with the national framework, which allows providers to use a number of approaches including face-to-face or video-teleconferencing.
The assessment teams recommend whether patients have an unmet health need over and above what a local authority can provide. Every individual has the right to appeal, the trust says.
The national framework also says it is best practice for assessors to meet with the individual being assessed and that there are concerns such CHC assessments can be a postcode lottery.
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Research by the Nuffield Trust thinktank found that nationally between January and March of this year, only around a fifth of people who underwent a CHC assessment were eligible and that approvals varied widely, from over 40% in Leicestershire to just 7.3% in Gloucestershire.
Nuffield Trust fellow Rachel Hutchings and her team acknowledge there is little public understanding around the CHC process and that there can be many complex reasons contributing to the disparities, such as the demographics of the population served by the respective trusts.
But she says the inconsistencies in how funding is allocated and assessed are a concern.
She told Sky News: “There are a lot of pressures within the social care system more generally, we know that long-term reform is definitely needed, but so far we’ve had very little progress on that, but in the short-term there’s a real urgent crisis facing social care as well and we see a lot of these challenges kind of exemplified within CHC.”
Rachel Hutchings from Nuffield Trust
NHS England told Sky News that “anyone eligible for continuing healthcare should receive a package of support that is tailored to their individual needs and preferences”.
It continued: “The process of assessment for continuing healthcare and decision-making should also be centred around the individual, taking into account their needs, or their representative’s view where appropriate, and they should be empowered and assisted to participate.”
Mick’s CHC funding was eventually reinstated six weeks later after a social worker and a local GP intervened.
But Diane says she believes her ex-husband’s final days are indicative of how patients nearing the end of life are treated and that Mick would have opted for assisted dying had it been available.
After a summer dominated by criticism over the small boats crisis and asylum hotels, Labour says it’s planning to overhaul the “broken” asylum system.
As MPs return to Westminster today, Home Secretary Yvette Cooper will speak about the government’s success in tackling people smugglers and plans for border security reform.
August saw the lowest number of Channel crossings since 2019 – but the last year has the most on record. Pic: Reuters
Labour hopes that the raft of changes being proposed will contribute to ending the use of asylum hotels, an issue which has led to widespread protests over the summer.
Ms Cooper will set out planned changes to the refugee family reunion process to give “greater fairness and balance”, and speak to the government’s promise to “smash the gangs” behind English Channel crossings.
National Crime Agency (NCA) figures show record levels of disruption of immigration crime networks in 2024/25. Officials believe this contributed to the lowest number of boats crossing the Channel in August since 2019.
But, despite the 3,567 arrivals in August being the lowest since 2021, when looking across the whole of 2025, the figure of 29,003 is the highest on record for this point in a year.
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Labour says actions to strengthen border security, increase returns and overhaul the asylum system, will result in “putting much stronger foundations in place so we can fix the chaos we inherited and end costly asylum hotels”.
In a message to Reform UK, which has promised mass deportations, and the Tories, who want to revive the Rwanda scheme, Ms Cooper will say: “These are complex challenges, and they require sustainable and workable solutions, not fantasy promises which can’t be delivered.”
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The town at boiling point over migration
While the home secretary will look back at the UK’s “proud record of giving sanctuary to those fleeing persecution”, she will argue the system “needs to be properly controlled and managed, so the rules are respected and enforced, and so governments, not criminal gangs, decide who comes to the UK”.
She will also give further details around measures announced over the summer, including the UK’s landmark returns deal with France, and update MPs on reforms to the asylum appeals process.
Shadow home secretary Chris Philp dismissed Ms Cooper’s intervention as a “desperate distraction tactic”, reiterating record levels of illegal Channel crossings, the rise in the use of asylum hotels and the highest number of asylum claims in history in Labour’s first year.
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Richard Tice reveals how navy would deal with small boats
Sir Keir Starmer too, says he intends to “deliver change,” using a column in Monday’s Mirror to criticise the Tories and Reform UK for whipping up migrant hatred.
And the prime minister isn’t the only one to hit out at Reform UK’s flagship immigration plan, with the Archbishop of York accusing it of being an “isolationist, short-term kneejerk” approach, with no “long-term solutions”.
In response, Richard Tice, Reform’s deputy leader, told Sunday Morning With Trevor Phillips the archbishop was “wrong” in his criticism.
Anti-asylum demonstrators in Epping, Essex. Pic: PA
Mr Tice, who is the MP for Boston and Skegness, said he was a Christian who “enjoys” the church – but that the “role of the archbishop is not actually to interfere with international migration policies”.
Meanwhile, the Court of Appeal will hand down its full written judgment in the Bell Hotel case today, which saw Epping Forest District Council fail in an attempt to stop asylum seekers from being put up there.
Protests continued in Epping on Sunday night, with police arresting three people.
An anti-asylum demonstration also took place in Canary Wharf on Sunday, which saw a police officer punched in the face and in a separate incident, a child potentially affected by synthetic pepper spray.
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