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Care Opinion

Wasted journeys and lack of support

Posted By BucksGuy473612

"Wasted journeys and lack of support"

About: One Recovery Bucks / Aylesbury

(as a service user),

Last week when I went into One Recovery, due to staff sickness, drop-in was moved to Unity House. People turned up but left quickly, because they, 'didn't want to hang out in a dentist waiting room'. The chairs were uncomfortable, and there was no one to talk with, because all the staff were in the other rooms.

People turned up for appointments but were turned away, because the staff member was off sick. That resulted in wasted journeys. I think it should be a standard procedure, when there's a staff sickness, for the other workers to phone up, to rearrange or cancel the appointments, to save clients from having wasted journeys.

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Responses

Response from Tracy Braddock, Service Manager, Inclusion 5 years ago
Tracy Braddock
Service Manager,
Inclusion

Submitted on 18/05/2018 at 10:46
Published on Care Opinion at 13:21

Hi there, thanks for taking the time to share your important feedback to us again. Unfortunately we had experienced an outbreak within our staff team of the Diarrhoea & Vomiting bug. This left us short staffed for a very brief period, we can't have staff back to work for 48 hours so we can reduce the spread of further infection. During this period we implemented our contingency plan already in place for these kind of events. This included providing as much essential services as possible. Therefore we made the decision to move our delivery of services for that time into Unity House, ensuring we had enough staff to safely delivery services from one building instead of our normal two on our Aylesbury site.

Sorry you didn't feel this option met yours or other service users needs, I appreciate Unity House is much smaller than our normal café where we run the open access drop-in. The priority in these very rare situations is to manage the service considering the most at risk and I feel that is what we did.

If you would like to meet with me in person to discuss your feedback so we can ensure better plans are in place for these rare occasions and the open access we are providing (as per your last feedback) I am more than happy to do this. I am based at Aylesbury so the next time you come in ask any member of the team to find me and hopefully we can meet up and discuss.

Thanks again for your valuable feedback, we always strive to learn from our service users experiences.

Regards

Tracy

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Update posted by BucksGuy473612 (a service user)

I feel that your reply did not acknowledge or discuss fixing the problem. I can't come in to speak with you, I believe this would risk my already poor treatment, getting worse, as a result of complaints made here.

Far from being a very rare event, I've personally had 4 occasions, when drop-in or appointments were cancelled without warning, since October.

I wasn't asking that in the event of a norovirus outbreak, that client comfort be placed at higher priority then client safety. But since you bring that up, protecting clients from norovirus exposure, by cancelling drop-in, and phoning people to cancel appointments, is exactly what is required to keep people safe. Better to do that, then to allow people into the service, but ignore them until they get fed up and leave.

Changing the staff absence procedures, to phone clients about drop-in or appointment cancellations, should be a much higher priority.

Response from Tracy Braddock, Service Manager, Inclusion 5 years ago
Tracy Braddock
Service Manager,
Inclusion

Submitted on 30/05/2018 at 16:56
Published on Care Opinion at 16:57

Hi there,

Thank you for your further response and I am sorry for not addressing the part of your feedback regarding cancellation communication. I’ll explain our current processes which will hopefully help to explain the situation a little more clearly. I definitely agree with your point that staff should contact service users if we have to cancel sessions but unfortunately, we can’t do this for drop-in sessions because by their very nature and purpose, we don’t know who is coming into drop-in. However, if a staff member has told a service user to attend drop in on a specific day for a set purpose such as food voucher then I would expect them to inform these people of the closure. I am not aware of other instances where the drop in has been closed apart from the time discussed previously or where we have closed the service for staff training, always with warning. If we are letting service users into the building, then we are open and staffed.

It is hard for me to investigate your appointments being cancelled without knowing who you are so I can audit back, which I would really like to do. I pride myself on keeping all our service users’ needs the focus of our service and from your feedback and clear frustration it appears we haven’t in your case and I would like to apologise for this.

If our vision and processes are not been delivered by our staff engaging directly with service users, I take responsibility for that and need to change it. Please be assured I only want you to feel heard so I can understand the specifics and can rectify your concerns. Your treatment would not be negatively impacted in any way by speaking to me so please do get in touch if you feel able to do so, however I understand if you would prefer not to, and I hope this response has helped explain things a little more. Once again, thank you for your valued feedback.

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