"My discharge was delayed due to lack of information"

I’m a newly-retired patient who encountered delayed discharge in March 2018 from a surgical facility centralised in a hospital 50 miles away, so in another county, NHS board and council area to that of my flat. I then faced an unnecessarily risky start back at home due to an inability to find information on one-off services to buy in, so to get the flat straight and clean.

My hospital treatment made me well enough for discharge with no warranted call on the Patient Transport Service. But raw patches on one deadened leg left me frail for the tasks of waiting for medication and then getting home by public transport, even though my flat is very close to a railway station and a regular bus route.

My discharge was delayed due to a lack of information, as the kind nurses drew a blank when diligently seeking relevant information from Social Work. I’ve no welfare entitlement (except for the state pension and entitlement card e.g. for free bus travel), so Social Work may well have been too over-stretched to respond.

Success in my case depended upon having at least initial information on public transport options for getting home, and on one-off decluttering, laundry and advocacy services which are locally-available when at home.

Info was displayed outside the hospital ward, but with contact details for the hospital’s locality and not the patient’s home locality.

Info displayed did not clearly indicate where a charity could be open to providing one-off help at a charge or for a donation.

The above was raised with NHS Patient Relations who explained that policy now allows patients to be discharged to somewhere other than in their own primary health centre’s catchment area. This would have helped, as I was not allowed to stay for the first week with a friend in a third county.

Local people encourage me to raise this risk of delay, as my story encourages each community well (or hub) being established by NHS and Social Work to hold some information on available services in its locality, so a hospital’s discharge staff may access details for any locality within its patient catchment area. This would help to curb bed-blocking and also stem call on emergency health and hospital services, by enabling home-based people to cope with a drop in capacity, for example as faced in their first few weeks home after a stay in hospital.