I was told by staff and even a doctor, that I would be released on the Monday morning. The very specific time of 10.30 am was mentioned to me more than once. I was now simply a healthy person taking up an NHS bed, with people on the gurney shelves like lumps of meat dumped in a pantry in no set order. I was counting the days and hours to Monday.
Next, a total unwillingness by staff to listen to what the patients are quite plainly saying. I was subjected to a particularly dangerous act of wilful ignorance. Due to the sudden-ness of my call in to go to hospital and not knowing how long for I was left with just 20 minutes to pack. As to vital stoma bags, I had just four with me, enough for four days or four changes. I was not worried by this as on previous visits the hospital has provided any required bags for me. I told staff several times that I might need new bags, cut to shape, at any time. Each felt it was best to leave it to the last minute, a practice I never do at home or travelling.
As I was reduced to my last bag on Sunday 1st December, I requested fresh ones again and had to re-emphasise their importance to get anywhere at all. I pointed out that there are several kinds of stoma bags for different purposes, the main ones being a/. urinostomy bags, (for taking wee from damaged or removed bladders, b/. Illostomy bags, drainable bags for illostomy stomas on the right hand side of the abdomen as the waste from them is loose and often liquid and easier to drain off than taking the bag off entirely. c/. Colostomy bags – As mine, a solid waste collector that cannot be drained but has to be manually removed from the abdomen and disposed of carefully along with its content and cleaning/sanitising dispensers that are used in the bag changes. I spelt out plainly that I needed new COLOSTOMY Bags. The nurse heard me and returned grinning with five ILLOSTOMY BAGs. I told her she had brought the wrong ones. She told me it was all the NHS had which I knew was garbage and she flounced off grinning like she hasd done a good thing. I got one of her colleagues to get me the bags I needed which she did in no time at all. Giving patients incorrect information, advice, medicaton, medical equipment, etc is going to cause a tragedy. Not listening to what the patient says, needs or feels is monstrously insensitive and unacceptable for any NHS based personnel.
Sunday night, matters deteriorated dramatically. My health still felt fine but I was woken in the night for a Covid test. I took it as routine. Hours later in the early hours of Monday 2nd December I was woken again and told that I had to move out my bed and the AAU to go to an ‘observation ward’. I pojnted out that I was due to be sent home that day, and asked what the point was in moving me now. The nurse went away to fetch a colleague to explain it to me. The colleague and a third person both simply regurtitated that I had to be moved. None of them were willing or able to tell me why. I speculated that the Covid Test might have been positive. I was assured that it was not, but it was needed to prove me fit for the move they knew about but kept from me until several hours later.
I was put in a wheelchair and sent upstairs to what was only described to me as an ‘observation area. As I got near it I saw from the name and surrounds that I was going into THE CANCER WARD. I pointed out as I learned the ward was my ‘Observation Area’ destination that I felt uncomfortable being parked and dumped in the very cancer patient area I had been in in 2000, four years before Monday 2nd December for my own bowel cancer surgery, so being sent there again was flat out traumatizing. I have a history of anxiety and depression brought about by my cancer struggle already without this. The staff of both AAU and the ward are utterly uninterested in the emotional and psychological effects of their mindless acceptance that Bed Boarding is somehow an ethical step forward. They simply couldn’t care less.
Finally I got an at least partial answer to the need to move me, though it was unsatisfactory. I wasn’t being moved for being ill or having fresh symptoms but for being healthiest of the patients on a ward where they wanted the bed for a new intake, or someone lucky enough to be sick enough to be pulled out of the carcass line that was the gurney corridor straight out of Dante’s Inferno. Again I was explicitly promised the doctors would see me after breakfast and I would be on my way by 10.30am. The time kept getting mentioned by different personnel despite proving utterly bogus.
I was not given a set bed on the ward among the 6 used already by those still with cancer. I was crudely sandwiched between two of them on a bed which had no locker, no cabinet and no curtains for drawing in to give me any privacy if required. I was told that there was also no wifi socket for me though a/. I was using wifi to access the outside World and I did find an unused plug socket to use as my own WIFI socket and made use of that.
Monday morning arrived and with it, breakfast. I expected the doctors to be round at 10.30 am. I expected that to herald my discharge. No discharge and no doctors. I requested knowing when or if they were coming. I was just fobbed off with assurances they would, a leap of faith grounded in nothing or any effort to actually find out. By noon, and even the beginning of the lunchtime services, I was getting both extremely bored and distressed. I felt terribly guilty for still being in the hospital all and knew that every minute I was not being discharged, more poor wretches were languishing on the gurneys hoping to be given beds and actual real care by people who don’t treat people like meat.
I was told that messages had been sent to the doctors. I asked why no one was willing to approach them directly. Everyone acted in fear at the very thought of daring to actually look the doctors in the eye and tell them a patient was ready to go home. The 10.30 am departure promise now proved to be utterly worthless.
I was handed a letter containing Orwellian 1984-speak outlines of the Bed Boarding policy and an accompanying missive addressed to me personally by the ward sister which largely regurgitates much from the main Boarding propaganda flyer adding claims that are highly questionable.
1/. The letter claims that while lacking such things as WIFI and Lockers the ward does provide a bed, dignity and privacy screens and and a personal call buzzer. This sounds a positive and though the bed is there, the buzzer and screens are flat out NOT provided at all. I queried this to be told that the letter really means they can be made available on request. This is casuistry. The letter says they are there and they are not. Twisting words and empty rhetoric was the way I was spoken to to for much of my remaining time on the ward, hours of it, for there was still no sign of the doctor(s) able to release me and thus also release some poor individual from Gurney Limbo-Hell in the act. The letter actually says “any assessments will be arranged as appropriate to support your discharge.” Clearly me still being there itself was proof that this line was utter nonsense.
I complained to the staff, and even highlighted my despair and revulsion for their whole bed boarding policy, and how my presence amounted to being used to involuntarily bed-block access to those being fed tripe about unavailable beds. I was told bluntly that if I didn’t like it I could just discharge myself and get out any time I liked. That was when I compared the system to lack of care and blocks and unwillingness to listen to danger warnings that allowed Lucy Letby the freedom to kill infants. I was told off for comparing a nurse on the ward to Lucy Letby but that was just more casuistry, emotively accusing me of targeting an individual (I never once did that) and comparing them to Letby. My comparison was to the regime of not paying attention to warnings or speaking out openly which allowed Letby to do what she did. Similarly, the blind obedience to the boarding policy, indifference to mistakes like giving stoma patients the wrong stomas and not caring a damn about patients not getting a bed while patients not needing one are not allowed to leave one isn’t a threat to health and life too. The Letby comparison stands in this context and this context alone.
Finally at 4.20pm, a doctor materialized full of half-hearted ridiculous excuses for his delay. He first blamed the AAU for not including my name in a list of patients they considered fit to leave. WHAT? A/. Why was my name not on such a list. They knew from Friday, 72 hours before, that I was fit to go home. B/. Why was he not checking up on me and my condition anyway? Why was I treated as if I had ceased to exist, or have any value as a human being at all? How many other patients and their needs have conveniently fallen off essential paperwork? That oversight alone kept me in the hospital, and also meant that somebody already suffering pain or health threats was languishing in a corridor, cupboard, the corner of an IT Suite and not being treated with the respect or health support they deserve and worked for. This oversight and others like it must be fully investigated. Frankly, heads should roll.
It got worse. In his ongoing gushing nonsensical apologetics the Doctor added that hours later, a second e-mail went and this time, my name was on the list, but in reading the list he had not read it properly, and somehow my name was among the information he lazily skipped over. He himself blanked me out of existence.
Finally, he gave me the green light to leave. I still had some time to wait as discharge notes and instructions on future meds to be taken needed processing. This was suffiecently within routine not to worry me. I even got the evening meal while awaiting patient tansport home., It was 7pm when I got home. Had everyone done their job correctly that would have been noon. As I left, no one had still prepared the bed I had now fully vacated for the next patient to take it. Leaving with my designated driver, I passed by the pitiful creatures on the gurney lines one last time. Many may still be there.
My complaint is multiple. a/. A need to see the entire Bed Boarding regime torn down and its champions fired in the interests of patient welfare and well being (that thing we come to hospital for in the first place).
b/. Staff who fail to include patient names on important documents directly relating to them need to be investigated.
c/. Doctors and any/all staff selectively skipping patient information they can’t be bothered with need to be investigated.
d/. Staff, including nurses, who see a patient needs specific kinds of support and instead expect the patient to make do with an impractical useless alternative to save themselves actually making a bit of an effort at listening or going to storage to acquire the right things need to be investigated.
e/. Staff who, faced with a distressed patient who can’t understand an ongoing system failure to process letting him go home and let another patient with greater more immediate need with ‘just discharge yourself’ as the ward sister who came out to intimidate me need to be investigated. That my still being there was due to unsent and unread e-mails and staff just plain not doing their jobs, treating me as if I was just being awkward and objectionable for the sake of it was totally unacceptable. The Doctor’s comments proved me right. Her attitude need to be investigated. She sent me to Coventry after her ‘discharge yourself’ remarks which strikes me as frankly immature.
That I loathe Bed Boarding as an admin policy is obvious and much of that policy is down to governments (current and now in opposition) but the problems I saw were not down to the politics, but direct practice – staff just plain not doing their jobs right or at all. Indifference to getting patients out when healed has an inevitable knock on effect on patients gridlocked onto gurneys coming in. As I rotted, waiting for a Doctor to finally make an effort to see me I wondered if my time on arrival rotting in an IT unit, was genuinely from bed shortages or just from staff not being the least bit interested in letting healed patients already in their charge go home so I or another could move in. Governments past and present were not to blame for my distress and discomfort. It was squarely down to laziness, rudeness, ignorance as to the differences between different kinds of stoma when dealing with a stoma related patient, and a willingness to turn ugly to the patient for daring to openly state unhappiness with such a dysfunctional, dangerous regime. They are not Lucy Letby’s. They are the kind of people who let Lucy Letby’s have their day. It needs addressing urgently, before someone actually dies if it doesn’t prove in some future hearing or tribunal to already be happening. Sadly, I will not be surprised if that proves to be the case.
I am already half-promised a stay at the hospital to surgically remove a large and growing hernia that affects my stoma and may even have played a part in creating the blockage that had a domino effect on my kidneys. My efforts to ask if that could be addressed during this stay fell on deaf ears, and at no point was the exact or more likely cause of my blockage arising in the first place ever discussed with me. Leaving patients in the dark, and leaving us on gurneys in corridors are two sides of the same coin at the Hospital. It leaves me in absolute dread of any future treatment at the hands of the current regime there as if being ill/sick enough to need it was not enough.
Hi Forester42 welcome to the forum. Wow that sounds like a challenging and difficult stay in hospital. I think you make some very valid points in your post, some I'm not so sure about! My concern is that you must put all this in writing and raise this as a complaint with The Health Authority that the hospital comes under..It is so important that the powers that be have been notified of these events as they are reportable and recordable so a record of complaint will be kept. I maybe wouldn't make reference to Lucy Letby but I understand what you are trying to say. Put it all down and them send it to the appropriate area of the health board.
gail
