Barry Lane, of Willoughby Crescent, said his daughter Cherry's feeding tube was causing her excruciating pain, so he rushed her to hospital to have it removed.

He said, "My wife Angela and I had the misfortune of having to take our profoundly disabled 21-year-old daughter Cherry to the A&E department last Saturday morning (November 24), where we waited for an hour-and-a-half before our girl's deteriorating condition forced us to perform a bit of 'minor surgery' ourselves.

"Our daughter's feeding tube, or Percutaneous Endoscope Gastrostomy (PEG), was doing its level best to disappear in its entirety through her abdomen and into her stomach and we needed a doctor's help to withdraw it, check for any injury the rogue device might have caused, and then replace it with a new one.

"These PEGs are not that uncommon yet there is apparently only one person at the DGH who knows what these things are and how they are managed.

"The one person we needed to see was, not unreasonably, having a weekend off.

"A consultant who was allegedly 'on call' declined to attend, and so we set about trying to remove the offending and apparently immovable PEG ourselves and at least give our daughter some temporary relief.

"We were eventually seen by a very pleasant young gastro-enterologist who did what she could despite her freely confessed lack of knowledge about PEGs, and she checked that our makeshift handiwork hadn't done any obvious additional harm.

"My wife persuaded the kind sister and nurse on one of the wards to let us 'borrow' a bed so that our now quite distressed daughter could at least lie down and suffer a little more comfortably."

Mr Lane, whose daughter has Rett Syndrome, claimed the ward Cherry was placed in was dirty.

He said, "As grateful as we were for the bed, we were as appalled by the state of the ward.

"The floor was filthy and an electrical extension socket left to drift around beneath the bed was so encrusted with dirt that I wondered if it was actually some kind of art installation.

"Blaming patients and visitors for introducing infections such as MRSA into the DGH would have greater credence if hospital managers at every level were actually doing anything at all to control the filth already in the building.

"All those bottles of hand-cleanser now sprinkled liberally about the hospital are a start but they do nothing to combat the dirt on floors, walls, under doors and in nooks and crannies."

Rett Syndrome is a neurological disorder which is genetic in origin. It affects mainly girls, and only a very few boys.

People with Rett Syndrome are profoundly and multiply disabled and highly dependent on others for their needs throughout their lives.

A hospital spokesman said, "As yet, we have not received a complaint from Mr Lane but if he wishes to make a formal complaint, this will be fully investigated under the trust's usual complaints procedure."