[Guest post by Sharon Levisohn]
Mother came home from hospital on Friday, having been in over Christmas and New Year. She has advanced COPD (emphysema) and had a respiratory virus that resulted in pneumonia.
However, her lengthy stay was not due to her illness – a week of steroids and antibiotics settled that insofar as it could be – but the inability to plan a discharge to meet her ongoing needs. The hospital wanted to send her home with three (local authority funded) home care visits plus daily district nurse calls. The social worker could not authorise the home care package without it “going to panel” and of course there would be no more panel meetings until January 7th. Then the hospital suggested a nursing home placement but, despite full-time oxygen dependency and limited mobility, my mother did not meet the criteria for a funded admission. Next they suggested a short admission to a cottage hospital. That was rejected as they thought, frankly, that the journey would kill her. Plan D was to be discharged home with the support of the (health-funded) Re-enablement Team; however, she was not open to this as her condition was too far progressed for rehabilitation. All this time, Mother was in an acute bed – one of those infamous bed-blockers – on a ward with confirmed Norovirus, while the family and I rode the Waltzer of uncertainty and conflicting updates, always aware that she might just give up the long battle with COPD.
What is the point of this personal anecdote of woe over the festive period? I suppose it is not a unique case; even on the ward there were several other patients unwillingly playing the Cherchez La Femme game of discharge co-ordination. How many patients and families in how many hospitals were going through similar experiences? What vexed me – and as a former nurse I am not criticising the frontline ward staff – was that the hospital did not seem to know what qualifying factors were applied to the various options – one might have assumed that they had confirmed Mother’s eligibility before informing her and the family only to dash their hopes. The other bugbear is the responsibility for funding. Surely, if a risk assessment has shown that a frail elderly terminally ill patient has been assessed as needing input from various agencies in order to be at home with the people and dogs and personal touches she loves, which give her a little quality of life, and if we believe that it is better for the elderly to live at home so far as is possible, surely then the funding needs to be provided? Or shall we simply abandon that principle as practically unviable?
Unsafe Spaces 