"Lack of attentiveness and poor post-discharge..."

I'm not sure how worthwhile it is to leave a review since no review has been replied to since March, ie over 6 months ago. But here goes ...

My main issue is the delayed response to calls for attention. When the call-nurse button is pressed, I expect a much quicker response - this is a call for help, often from a patient who is on a drip and cannot, for example, get to the toilet without being disconnected. My wife was suffering from vomiting and diarrhoea and also had urinary urgency. HCAs are not allowed to disconnect drips (even though it's a simple procedure) so a nurse is needed. Nurses do not treat the calls promptly, with the result that my wife was sitting in a soiled nappy - apart from the sheer unpleasantness of it all, this increased the risk of a urinary tract infection, and the soiling was wrongly attributed to incontinence as opposed to a lack of timely care.

The call just triggers a stationary light over the bay door. This is nowhere near insistent enough and can be too easily ignored. It would be better if it flashed on and off or emitted a sound - something that demanded attention.

The lack of response was not due to conflicting emergencies in the ward. It is not a question of the staff being run off their feet because of lack of resources - there seems to be an organizational-culture issue of not treating calls with the requisite urgency.

This is particularly the case when the patient is isolated because of suspected infection. Such patients should be regularly checked - at one point my wife was too confused to use the call button, couldn't speak above a whisper, was on a drip and suffering from faecal urgency, and yet was only checked twice in the night. She was then berated for having soiled herself. Maybe one of the standard procedures should be to check that patients know how to use the call button, and can demonstrate that they know. Nurses shouldn't assume anything when patients have confusion.

When my wife was finally discharged, we had to wait 3 hours to get the medicine to take home - when I approached the doctor after 2 hours to ask about the delay, I was told the pharmacy was busy. But when I saw a pharmacist in the ward, they said they weren't, but the nurse had failed to give instructions to the pharmacy. The pharmacist was then extremely helpful, but the culture in the hospital is to assume a state of busy-ness exists everywhere (A&E, on the ward, diagnostics and laboratory, pharmacy) without checking that this is the case.

Finally, the guidance post-discharge was non-existent. My wife had a stent inserted into her colon, but we received no advice about how long we might expect it to take to get back to her normal bowel habits. I know people can vary but we had no sense of what might be the range of possibilities. Also, no dietary advice. Other trusts give specific advice after a stent - you can find them easily on the Web - but I expect Worcestershire to have its own set of guidelines.