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"Communication with a patient at East Surrey hospital"

About: East Surrey Hospital

(as a relative),

My mother was admitted into ES Hospital last week. I live 3 hours journey from the hospital but have managed to visit most days ( 6 hours travel per day).

I bought her a mobile phone and put money on it only to discover that her Ward has no phone signal. I try to phone her every morning but rarely does anyone answer and they cannot bring a phone to her bed. There are no portable landline phones in this ward.

I feel this is a really significant shortcoming as the morale of patients directly impacts on their physical well being. Why cannot something be done about this?

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Responses

Response from Ian Mackenzie, Director of Information and Facilities, Surrey and Sussex Healthcare NHS Trust 8 years ago
Ian Mackenzie
Director of Information and Facilities,
Surrey and Sussex Healthcare NHS Trust

I am responsible for everything to do with facilities, estates and IT. This includes our £50m building programme, food, cleaning, estates, porters, telephones, IT, transport, car parks and anything similar. Also leading our new Patient Experience Programme.

Submitted on 02/07/2012 at 13:52
Published on Care Opinion at 14:54

picture of Ian Mackenzie

Thank you for your comment about telephoning patients whilst they are inpatients at East Surrey Hospital.

Having received this comment I went down and looked at a number of wards to check what was currently available. Some wards have handsets that can be passed to patients and some don’t.

I have therefore arranged for all wards to be upgraded to portable handsets; this will take a couple of weeks to arrange. I have however ascertained which ward this comment refers to and a portable handset is being put in that ward this afternoon.

I appreciate that it won’t affect your own situation but all new wards we open (such as Copthorne and Charlwood wards in February 2012) have individual patient phones – as part of an individual patient entertainment system - as we identified this as a service we wished our patients to have. We intend to roll this out across the hospital, but it will take some time to complete the whole site.

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Response from Ian Mackenzie, Director of Information and Facilities, Surrey and Sussex Healthcare NHS Trust 8 years ago
We have made a change
Ian Mackenzie
Director of Information and Facilities,
Surrey and Sussex Healthcare NHS Trust

I am responsible for everything to do with facilities, estates and IT. This includes our £50m building programme, food, cleaning, estates, porters, telephones, IT, transport, car parks and anything similar. Also leading our new Patient Experience Programme.

Submitted on 03/07/2012 at 12:15
Published on Care Opinion at 12:34

picture of Ian Mackenzie

As an update the phone is now on this ward and the other portable handsets are on order.

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