"Poor Communication about my mother's care"

My 95 year old mother was admitted to Dumfries and Galloway Royal Infirmary in June 2018, having become very confused and already having underlying heart problems. It was fairly quickly established that she was suffering from dementia but no cause for the sudden decline could be identified. My sister and I visited daily for the next week and while the care she was getting was very good, we found it difficult to get information about what was happening - initially they suggested she should return to her own home with visits from carers. We knew this was impossible, and in fact the hospital recognised that after a few days and we started to talk about a care home. Neither my sister nor I live near Dumfries and on the next Tuesday and Wednesday neither of us was able to visit. On the Tuesday my sister received an e-mail message asking that one of us should sign a form from the occupational therapist, agreeing to have the gas fire and cooker in my mother's home isolated, to allow her to return home. My sister queried this, saying that returning home was not an option; she was told that this was simply the first stage in the process of sending my mother back to her home town. My sister said that I would sign the form when I was next in on the Thursday. When I visited that day, there was no form, so I asked the nurses and they could not find anything at all, but they left a message for the occupational therapist. When I visited on the Friday, the occupational therapist came along to my mother's room and got me to sign the form. At this stage, I repeated what we had said that discharge to her house was impossible and I was assured that it was simply part of the process. This was about 3 pm. Then a nurse from the pharmacy arrived in my mother's room and put a package into the medicines cabinet, saying to us not to worry, it was for the transfer tomorrow. We asked what that meant and we were told that my mother was being transferred to the cottage hospital in our home town on the Saturday.  We said we had not been told. We then asked every nurse who came in over the afternoon and no one could give us any information. When my mother's evening meal was being brought in, I asked again and the nurse then said she would get someone more senior to speak to us. She brought in a senior nurse who said that there had been a meeting around midday that day and it had been decided that my mother would be transferred to our hometown on the Saturday, around lunchtime. We were also told that my mother could take one bag with her in the ambulance. I assumed that someone in an office was perhaps at that time e-mailing or telephoning to my sister or me to tell us this. Before I left my mother that evening, I packed all her possessions, just leaving her what was needed for that night and the journey next morning. I then got the bus back home expecting to find a message telling me all this when I got there. However there was no message of any sort.  I phoned my sister to tell her all this, as she was intending travelling from England to Dumfries the next day and I was intending to join her there. She also had had no message. So we agreed that she would come direct to me, instead of stopping off at Dumfries. On Saturday, my sister was within a mile of here around 1 pm when she received a phone call from the cottage hospital to say that our mother had arrived there and that we could visit when we wanted.  This was the only communication we had at all over the transfer, nothing from DGRI. If I had not been with my mother on the Friday, by that time I would have been travelling to Dumfries by bus and my sister would probably have been around Carlisle on her journey there. While we felt the care in DGRI was excellent, we feel their communication with patients' families left a lot to be desired.