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Concerns

Story from nhs.uk

"Concerns"

About: Royal Hallamshire Hospital

I cannot fault the treatment process and the ENT ward at all. All the staff were lovely, helpful, polite and treatment went very well. My real concerns is the the discharge process and obtaining the prescribed medicines. Discharge was agreed at 10 am and medicines were not received until 5.30. I am told there is only one pharmacist at the weekend for the whole hospital. So a bed was blocked unnecessarily for a whole day. What a totally frustrating experience. The staff on the ward have no influence. Antidotally I am told it can take up to 8pm to get medicines. This causes unnecessary stress for all involved. There does not seem to be any options to chase or check where the prescription is. Waiting seems the only option. This needs to be addressed. Is it not possible to have more staff to deal with medicines quicker. Then when arrived home it was discovered I had been given medicines short of what I required. Emailed but no response.

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Responses

Response from Sheffield Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust nearly 2 years ago
We are preparing to make a change
Sheffield Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust

Submitted on 25/09/2023 at 17:16
Published on Care Opinion at 17:39

Thank you for taking the time to share your feedback about your recent experience of care with our services. We are pleased to read that staff were kind and your care while on the ward was good.

We are sorry to hear about the difficulties with discharge that you experienced and the delays this cause to you getting home- we appreciate how frustrating this must have been.

There is a project team in the Trust who are currently undertaking a piece of work which is looking to standardise early discharge planning including the prescribing of TTO’s (your medications to take home) in a timely manner.

This project is currently in its early stages but the project involves the Pharmacy team and aims to improve the experience around waiting for medications to be able to be discharged home. The project is currently running pilots on 3 wards at NGH, from which they plan to share the tools and learning to all wards across our hospitals. The focus of these improvements are around establishing operational huddles so that the wards pay attention to discharge tasks for that day and the following day to ensure actions are completed in a timely manner.

Your feedback has been shared with the team involved in this project so will be considered in the work that this group are doing.

I hope that this provides you with assurance that we are proactively looking at how to improve discharge planning to help patients get home once they are told they are able to be discharged.

In terms of the fact that you were given medicines short of what you required- we are sorry that you have not yet received a response about this. If you wish to follow this up, please contact our PALS team on 0114 271 2400 or by emailing sth.pals@nhs.net. The PALS team will ask you to share some personal details in order for us to investigate this matter for you.

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