"Poor post operative care + follow up"

After being very impressed with the care my mother received as an inpatient for lung surgery it is extremely unfortunate that the post surgical care / follow up experience has been not been as positive. 

After a VATS procedure my mother and I were advised that she would be followed up in 6 weeks in clinic; either locally or at the GJNH. Following discharge my mother has been very poorly due to post surgery complications and her recovery has been a lot slower than anticipated. Primary care in the local area is pretty inconsistent and difficult to navigate; locum gps simply kept prescribing high dose pain killers and saying they’d await the post surgical review. However no appointment was sent. So I called the local hospital after 6 weeks a number of times to be told no appointments were made for the review and the consultant wasn’t holding clinics in the local area any more. After 2 weeks of me chasing an appointment via secretaries in both our local hospital and at the GJNH an appointment was given for GJNH for yesterday which would have been over ten weeks post surgery. 

Relieved that I was eventually able to get an appointment for my mum with her consultant I duly took her to the appointment. She had lots of questions relating to her recovery, medicines and ongoing pain. However we were left confused why the consultant we were booked into see did not see her. 

We were seen by a consultant that we weren’t scheduled to see, and told during the consultation they would need to liaise with her consultant as there were aspects of my mother’s recovery that needed to be discussed. So we returned to the waiting room to allow the consultant to continue to see their own patients. After 2.5 hours of waiting we were approached by a nurse who advised that we could leave the department for lunch as my mum’s consultant had other patients to see - patients who had appointment scheduled after my mother. On explaining my confusion and dissatisfaction with that the staff nurse felt it reasonable to advise me that I had to appreciate the consultant was dealing with sick patients! Whilst some improved communication skills are clearly required by the staff nurse, in particular the inability to deescalate a situation - I don’t think it is  reasonable to tell a patient and a carer that you’ve had no input with they have to appreciate that the consultant was dealing with more sick patients when they had no idea about what was wrong with my mother, her post surgery complications and the fact that post surgical processes and follow up had not happened, not to mention all the stress endured trying to get an appointment and having driven over an hour to get to the appointment! 

Within five minutes of this interaction with the staff nurse my mother was seen again by the consultant and told that my mother’s consultant had left the department to attend a meeting. This seemed a bit odd after being told by the staff nurse that other patients in the department were going to be seen before my mother. 

This really was not a good experience and has unfortunately left us with a negative opinion of care being delivered at GJNH. All this experience did was cause agitation and leave my mother with unanswered questions and feel like she was wasting people’s time, and this was certainly reinforced by the manner of the staff nurse. Nothing about my mother’s post operative follow up has been patient centred or helpful, in fact it has been harmful to her recovery overall. This simply should not happen. If clinics are over booked or there isn’t  the capacity to meet the demands of the clinic patient shouldn’t be made to feel like they have less right to be seen.