No great surprise but shocking none the less, here’s a report of hospitals suspected of knowingly discharging patients back to care homes knowing that they have Coronavirus but not telling care home staff. CHC is investigating…
Are they also doing similar for discharge to home setting??
Rosemary
This is shocking and very sad
Words fail me.
Sorry to have to post it but I thought we ought to know what might be happening.
This is not good news or advice, but something we need to know so no apologies necessary, Rosemary.
In answer to your question - yes, there is a case elsewhere on this Forum of this happening, a failed discharge. The patient was returned to hospital but the carer has been forced to stay off work and self-isolate for a fortnight.
It is bad enough that carers be forced into this traumatic position, but for virus-infected patients to be returned to care homes is absolutely not on.
I realise that NHS staff face difficult times and most of them are working like trojans to tackle this problem; however administrative slips do occur. I thought that tests for Covid-19 were becoming available, and hospitals and care homes would have priority access so why is this not happening?
What can we as carers do in the light of this? We need to be more vigilant, and assertive if necessary, when we deal with hospitals and care homes and satisfy ourselves that the proper checks have been made.
This is a general comment. Ideas from others will be welcome.
How do carers get hospitals to listen?
They act like dictators, don’t want to know about correct procedures!
I’m not sure, but if you remember, my wife was having trouble getting appointments at a suitable time, every appointment she was given had to be re-scheduled for a later time.
I tried first of all by contacting the correct person and it worked, but only for that one appointment.
After several months of this (my wife had 30 plus hospital/doctor appointments in that one calendar year) I took a scattergun approach. I found every possible email address that might be relevant and fired off the same email to all of them, one or two responded quite quickly with a useless answer, (disappointingly, the MS society was the worst), but about three weeks later I received responses from all of the others, and all in the space of a couple of hours. It was pretty obvious that they had got together over this and the problem has been resolved, (so far).