The plight of patients trapped in hospital despite being fit to leave
sir – Stella Currie (Letters, March 5) is not alone in her experience of patients occupying hospital beds for unnecessarily long periods.
A few months ago, following a visit to A&E, I was kept in overnight. During the doctor’s round in the morning, I was told that this really hadn’t been necessary, and I could leave as soon as I had received my discharge form and medication.
The hours passed and the nurses kept commenting that I was still there. At 5pm a diligent nurse said she would find a sister. Five minutes later the sister came running with my form and medication, and apologised profusely. At last I was able to leave.
Our senior medical staff should not be dashing around hospitals looking for a printer. During that day I could see what was going wrong. What are the managers doing?
Hon Ian Macgregor
London N2
sir – Several years ago I was shot in the
leg while at work and subsequently spent time in hospital awaiting surgery. In the end this couldn’t happen because of the position of the bullet, which remains in my leg.
I was discharged but had to wait almost six hours for my prescription. Bearing in mind that the person in charge of the dispensary was my own mother, I despair at the thought of how long some people must have to wait when they are not related to the staff.
Often such delays are caused by adhering rigidly to the order in which requests come into the dispensary, rather than working according to clinical need.
Andrew Pearce
London SE3
sir – There is a solution to the problem outlined by Stella Currie. An article in Hospital Times, “How Pharmacy can reduce discharge delays”, provides a very good example from North Tees and Hartlepool NHS Foundation Trust. The installation of automated Omnicell
medication dispensing cabinets, containing pre-labelled drug packs stored securely at ward level, reduced the ratio of “delays in transfer of care” from 4:5 in 2016-17 to 1:3 by March 2019.
It is a shame that such good practice isn’t rolled out across the NHS, although I have been told that my local hospital is also adopting the Omnicell system.
Patricia Murphy
London SE24
sir – With regard to NHS waste (Letters, March 5), my wife and I are contacted innumerable times to verify that we are going to attend a booked appointment. After the appointment, we are then asked how it went, and whether we could give it a score out of 10.
I often wonder what the NHS does with this information. Probably nothing.
Kevin Platt
Walsall, Staffordshire