NHS.. A Fekkin shambles O/T

Now then lads..

My Lollie has been in hospital for an operation which if successful will give her a sort of life in a year or two and release her left leg to be able to sit in the 1st time in 3 years. So here's the fkin story, yesterday her consultant said she could come home, the staff nurse said she would ring me to say so and not long after confirmed to Lollie that she had spoke to me and made discharge arrangements..

So I turn up at Pinderfields hospital in Wakefield (40 miles away) with Ella our 2.9 year old daughter oblivious to all of this and knowing I'd need to get Ella away for 5pm latest for tea, bath and bed taking into account the journey home too. I had no ****in phone call or anything, and to visit Lollie who is all excited to come home to tell her I know **** all about it was a nightmare. They told us that discharge will be at 7pm but no ****er had phoned me and I knew nowt about her being discharged. Anyway, as a result of it all Lollie had to stay in hospital another night till I got her today. Now I don't know whether it's a National thing but living in Yorkshire for the last 3 years, I'm of the opinion that these people are the most laziest, thickest twats I've ever come across..

BTW the nurse that said she had called me to arrange Lollie's discharge suspiciously rang in sick today.. One ****ing angry Joe..but she's home, so now the real care begins again..

 

Bloody shocking mate...Some of these people just treat people like numbers and don't seem to give a toss about the people involved..
PS..Give my best wishes to Lollie and the bairn..

 

Will do mate & as always our thoughts are with you and your family. Seeing Lollie as what she is now to the girl I met and giving so much up to look after her and our Ella, I cannot even think of being anywhere else but here for these two girls. Now, Iv'e been married twice, the 1st for 24 years and the second for 5 years, never before have I loved anyone like this lovely,hapless, wheelchair bound lady.. time to make this godly, time to let her know my love, time to commit for ever, time for you to get a suit Reg, you will be invited..

 

Unfortunately the NHS is a huge organization so your going to get your fair share of arseholes. However there are also a lot of really good hardworking folks of which I hope am one. I work in mental health which I believe as a smaller part of the nhs tends to function a bit better than the larger hospitals. I tend to have regular dealings with general hospitals and regularly come across piss poor communication problems. to an extent where my patients have gone to them for treatment, died and we don't get informed until family members turn up to collect their belongings!
From what I see happening is that nursing posts are being cut in huge numbers currently but on the quiet. Then shock horror they don't have enough nurses to cover the wards, so they bring in agency nurses usually on a higher hourly rate with little or no experience or specialist training and often foreign. I'm not being xenophobic I have seen this. So when you throw these variables into a busy hospital ward is it any suprise they can't tell their arse from their elbow?
Please don't forget the good people and treatment our nhs can still deliver. I'd be without a mother (lymphoma), father (bladder cancer), grandfather (bowel cancer) and girlfriend (ex) without the nhs.
And I've just finished a 06.45 til 21.15 shift for time in lieu due to staff shortages so I ain't lazy.
Hope the bairns doing well. All the best.

 

A cracking post and thanks. We always get the same problem with Lollie, being Cerebal Palsy the nurses seem to run scared or haven't got a clue about acute spasms, post-op trauma and the effects it has on a Cerebal Palsic patient. Like I said, we have her home now so the real care begins and here's hoping after a week or so the baclofen pump that has been inserted in Lollie proves it's worth. I wasn't bashing the NHS but in Lollie's case she has had a rough ride..

 

Poor bairn sounds like she's been through the mill. Id normally advise people who've had bad experiences to complain to the ward manager but I fear you'd be wasting your time. Patients come in second to cutting costs and reducing bed numbers and its going to get worse.
You'll have to spoil her rotten now she's home!

 

I've done it for 3 years now, the sad thing is in the 10 days she was in there and written down instructions from me, they managed to totally **** up her meds. When you are looking at Diazepham, Pregabilin, 75mg Fentanyl patches, dantrolene, baclofen, dihydrocodeine for the last 3 years at set doses and they manage to **** the lot up, you can imagine the effect it had on her. Like I said, she's home now under a watchful eye and settled. Agree on everything you have said about the ward dis-organisation and for me the nurses lack of priorities. It seemed they hung around the non-to demanding patients for banter purposes and left the serious one's alone unless the buzzer was pressed. All in all, it's typical Britain, show up to work, do enough to get through the day and wait for pay-day..........

 

Pleased to here she's back home mate.

All the best as usual to the three of you, .

 

There are always going to be times where some people experiences are not good but to be honest, its an easy target to moan about. However, on the whole, the NHS is the golden fleece of this nation imo.

My question to you Joe is where would you have been without the NHS? How much money would the treatment, medication etc have cost you?

My family have so much to thank the NHS for over the years, and my mam owes her life to the cancer specialists at Durham Hospital, both at GP level and right to the top.

It would have cost my parents all their savings, their home and more to keep my mam alive without it and 60 years ago she would have just been allowed to die. We have all become so used to having the NHS on tap over the past 7 decades, that we now complain we have been kept waiting a few hours or there is a communications issue.

The nurses, doctors, orderlies etc work very hard to cope with the millions of people using it every day and I for one thank the lords they are there.

When this Tory Govt has reduced it to a 2nd class system for the majority of us and private health insurance is the norm for everyone, which they are hell bent on doing BTW, then maybe we will all appreciate its memory much more.

I am proud and thankful for the best, most affordable health system on the planet.

 

Believe me, I know. I work for the NHS.

The Nurses/Midwives/Band 5/6/7 workers ect will do their best to make sure certain duties are past on to the lower staff like me (Receptionists, Admins, Ward Clarks ect), so they can spend time when no one is visiting a ward, chatting and having a bacon sandwich.

Plus the NHS, instead of sacking ****e employees who can't do their job, they simply redeploy them to another unit or department, instead of going to the trouble of trying to hire new options, because it would take up time, and they simply can't be arsed.

I'm currently sharing shifts with an old woman who starts crying if she's asked to do something difficult. She refuses to do some of her work, and then she asks the other people in her position to join her in refusing to do the work.

For some reason, they can't sack her, and she claims she's being bullied just because she's asked to do her fair share of work.

Which means I've not only got to cope with more and more tasks being dumped on be by the higher class employees, I've got to deal with redeployments, that are supposed to be sharing the work load, and do it all myself.

And who's gonna get shat on if the job isn't done? Not the woman who cries about having to do her job, but me, the one that decides to stay extra hours sometimes to get a job done.

 

I totally respect your opinion and take on board what you say and I agree that different trusts do things differently, however without going through the last 3 years of Lollie's health, severe disability etc, I can say that the treatment and care she has received has been excellent in some areas but diabolical in others. I'm gonna leave it at that but felt compelled to answer your post.

 

Joe, I have been angered by your post. You and your Lollie should not have gone through that. You ar right about Yorkshire folk too. Never before have I come across a more docile bunch of people. Their supposed superiority comes across as rank arrogance and they have nothing to back it up. I long to move elsewhere.

 

Joe and everyone who has responded. It is clear that the NHS is a marvel at times and a frustrating mess at others.

I too have witnessed the 'care' where ward staff don't ensure an elderly disabled lady can get to the toilet, or reach her drink, or help her eat when she can't use a fork due to crippling arthritis. They too messed up her meds, which she was perfectly capable of managing on her own, but they wouldn't let her. She was a mass of bruises from poor handling despite us and her telling them what they needed to do. To be quite honest I am sure in the end she gave up and died because she hated being a burden on us, as we were having to go to hospital 3 times a day to make sure she was being fed, and washed and getting her medicine etc. I have more! My daughter had a DVT at 21 years old a few years ago. She was in agony and we found out later she had a blood clot in her iliac and femoral veins from pelvis to knee. They saw her in A and E but it was late so they gave her a shot of heparin and sent her out and told her to come back the next day for a scan and blood tests. This was at Edinburgh Royal Infirmary - a brand new PFI hospital with loads of fancy shops but no wheelchairs for patients, or staff to find one for her. We had to carry her out to the car. That's the modern NHS. It's a bloody disgrace.

Having said that the fault lies with poor management pure and simple. Can anyone remember when your local GP and district nurses used to go into hospitals (like in The Royal!)? There was continuity of care in those days; they knew your medical history and knew what happened to you in hospital and knew your needs when you came out. I am not saying GPs should be surgeons or oncologists but communications need to improve and if that takes personal contact then that's what needs to be done. If I could do one thing to improve the NHS I would restore this link between GPs and hospitals so they stop passing the buck to each other and we all get the care we deserve.

I can only imagine what your life is like Joe. I know how hard it was when my mother in law lived with us, but she was really only severely disabled for the last 4 or 5 months, you have had it for years and a young baby to care for too. You have my deepest admiration and best wishes and my prayers that your Lollie and all of you now get a better quality of life despite this latest ordeal.

 

Joe. I wasn't having a dig mate just trying to balance the debate.

I just get a bit tired of reading negatives about the NHS and try and ask people who do complain what they think would happen if it wasn't there.

Of course not everyone's experiences will be good but no one ever comes on to say good things, just bad.

If you consider how many millions of people use it every day, the number of bad are far out weighed by the good.

 

You are of course right Cestria. My stories and those of others above can be balanced with many positive stories too. I know that the NHS provides world class medical care and we are indeed very lucky to have it. But it is so frustrating when it seems that the basics are harder to manage than the serious stuff.

 

Tash is spot on. I've worked/work with people who I would sack on the spot for being lazy, incompetent and bullies. The problem is they'd take you to a tribunal for unfair dismissal and whether they win or not the time and financial costs would be exorbitant. So people get left in their posts or moved sideways. Tash's crying receptionist will say the trust neglected her mental health needs and play the victim and she'll carry on being a piss poor worker.
I fear everyone will soon find out the true value of the NHS once the Tories break it up and sell it off to their donors in private health care.

 

No problem Cest

 

This is one of the main reasons why my brother, who was a highly qualified psychiatric nurse within the NHS, felt compelled to leave. He was at times the only person on the ward who knew what he was doing, and some of the foreign agency workers didn't even speak much English and were unwilling to do the work that their NHS trained equivalents would do as a matter of course. Any complaints made against these workers were inevitably dismissed as the powers that be seemed to be terrified of being labelled with the racist card.

 

Hit the nail on the head there mate "cut managers".
I see millions of tax money wasted on art projects, private contractors, fact finding missions abroad for the top brass and then seeing beds reduced and wards closed it sickens me. I have to be careful what I say on here but I need to rant.
A newish hospital in our area has artwork in the form of a poem that runs along the floor through the hospital. It is slightly raised so creates a trip hazard. It meanders through the hospital so if your going to other parts you can't read it. Now what percentage of the population gives a **** about poetry? But I'll tell you what I give a **** about. I was shown around this hospital before it opened and the manager was so proud to show off the artwork they had just spent a MILLION pounds commissioning.
I'm not sure if the poem cost a million or it included some nice pictures on the walls but when did hospitals become ****ing art galleries!

One other I can't really go into but the northern echo printed a front page story a month or two ago about out of area patients. Needless to say the trust response was dishonest and a freedom of information act search would prove this.
Managers? Never met a good one.