Melony Elder was horrified when she found her mother dead in a hospital bed after nurses failed to notice she had passed away.

Mrs Elder, of Wicks Drive, Chippenham, says she is struggling to come to terms with the indignity of her mother's death and has demanded an explanation from Bath's Royal United Hospital.

To make matters worse, she says the hospital has lost all her mother's personal belongings.

The prognosis was poor for 73-year-old retired headteacher Sheila Pattinson when she was admitted to the hospital's Victoria Ward on April 30.

She was suffering from severe osteoporosis and had undergone treatment for breast cancer.

Mrs Elder, who runs the special needs unit at Middlefield Centre, said: "I knew she was not going to get better but it was just the way she died. I don't know how to come to terms with that."

The hospital told her that her mother had a Glasgow Coma Score of four, meaning she was unconscious and only responsive to pain but might still be able to hear.

On May 2, Mrs Elder and her mother-in-law Sheila Sampson went to visit Mrs Pattinson, arriving at 12.30pm. As they walked on to the ward a group of nurses was standing around a lunch trolley a short distance from her mother's bed, discussing lunch breaks.

As she approached her mother's bed Mrs Elder noticed that a knife, fork and spoon had been left on her table.

She felt this was very insensitive since her mother was being fed from a drip and was unconscious. Then to her horror Mrs Elder realised her mother was dead. "As soon as I got there I could see that she was dead. She was cold, pale and waxy. She had not just died," said Mrs Elder.

"We remained calm and dignified with great difficulty and checked my mother over before going to find somebody.

"The staff nurse was summoned and told me that she had just gone. She said she had checked her ten minutes earlier. This was a total lie. No way did she go cold in ten minutes."

Mrs Elder added: "They knew she was dying so why the heck didn't they draw the curtain? I wanted it to be dignified."

A doctor confirmed that her mother had died of bronchial pneumonia and heart failure.

Mrs Elder made a formal complaint before leaving the hospital. Two weeks later she met with its complaints manager, clinical director, a consultant and its head of nursing.

"They were open, honest and showed great empathy to me," said Mrs Elder.

"They said they would be investigating and they did not deny anything. They asked if they could make anything better. But what could they possibly do to make it better?"

Mrs Elder said the final straw came when the hospital lost her mother's personal belongings.

"They have yet to be returned and it is now more than one week after my mother's funeral," she said.

"They were only small things but there was a picture of my two-year-old son Luke, which she always took into hospital with her."

Mrs Elder said she had no faith in the hospital and could see why it had a zero star rating. "There are so many things wrong with it," she said.

A spokesman for the RUH said it was dealing with Mrs Elder's complaint seriously. "A thorough investigation is being carried out," he said.

"The trust would like to express its sincere sympathies to Mrs Patterson's family."