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Bed blocking or, " for the want of a nail, a shoe was lost" etc

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durhamjen Sun 11-Jan-15 12:05:36

When I was leaving hospital in 2013, it was on a Saturday. The surgeons had done their rounds at 9 a.m. and my consultant had said that I could leave that day, providing I went to my son's house and was not on my own.
I phoned my son, who arrived at 10 a.m. At noon, I was asked what I wanted for lunch. I said I wanted to go home. They checked their records, and discovered that the doctor had not signed me out.
Everybody on the ward said that they had heard the surgeon say I could go that day, so they managed to page one of the other doctors who had been doing the round with him. It took until 3 p.m. for me to get out of the hospital, as they then discovered that they did not have enough drugs to send me home!
That bed could have been given to someone else who was waiting for it.

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tanith Sun 11-Jan-15 11:59:19

Thats just terrible Soutra can fully understand your angry but as you say not staffs fault , the system just isn't working.. I hope OH gets home and feels better soon.

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Soutra Sun 11-Jan-15 11:54:02

DH was quite poorly around New Year so when we came home he rang to speak to his GP. As it turned out the GP was unable to ring him back until Wednesday but when he did, he arranged for DH to have a blood test. Because DH was really not too with it, he agreed to having this done on Friday rather than push for straight away. The test results showed that he was severely, if not dangerously anaemic ( we had suspected something like this, knowing the symptoms) but that result didn't come through until early evening so he was told to go to our local hospital via A&E and would be receiving 4 units of blood.
4 hours after arriving he made it as far as a bay in Resusc where he was seen but as no beds were available he was there until 3.30 on Saturday morning. The first transfusion started around 5 a.m. Blood transfusions take 4 hours per unit plus observation time and time to do blood tests in betwee pairs of units. Still hopeful at that stage he might be out on Saturday night or today at the latest.
At the time of writing, he has had the first units(yesterday, finished by early afternoon) bloods were taken for testing at midnight and by 11 o clock this morning he had still not seen a doctor or started the third and fourth units which the tests showed he needed. I think it is unlikely he will be out before tomorrow but I wonder at how many points in this tedious narrative things might have been different so that at least one bed could have been freed up in a male medical ward?
1) GP being available even for a quick word on the phone on Monday? 2) DH pushing for the blood test on Wednesday? 3) Taking up space in A&E for all those hours on Friday night? 4) Being able to see a doctor yesterday ( when I asked I was told -wait for it- there were only 2 doctors on duty in the whole hospital) ? 5) Having it done as originally planned, 2 units on Friday night and 2 on Saturday? The duty GP who rang through these results said it would be dangerous to leave it till Monday but OMG hospitals at weekends are another thing. I am angry but grateful for the friendly nursing staff dealing with an impossible state of affairs.

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