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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?

More about:

Responses

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

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 We have made a change

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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