"Staff under pressure"

Today I visited my grandmother for her 15th day in Coventry university hospital, on the whole my grandmother who was very poorly has been treated well especially when really poorly however as she appears to be getting better and thoughts are turning to sending her home I feel that the care has deteriorated.

She was in a six bedder where three beds needed a nurse to sit with the patient due to possible fall hazzards and wandering this is taking nurses away from doing normal duties, can there not be a bank of employees that can be used for patient sitting to releave qualified nurses to treat patients?

The nursing staff have a hell of lot to put up with and I beleive that a bureaucracy in the system does not help them, if there are to be long term patients that need nurse sitting how many hoops have to go through to request this continues without having to request this every day, nurse managers have a thankless task to deal with without trying to locate members of the management team to have things authorised, give them freedom to run their wards if things do not go to plan then their can be consequences that they can be made aware of. Caring for ill people is not cheap and aware that this is a business but the nursing managers do not request things unnecessarily. I challenge the chief nursing officer to spend a day in any ward where the nurses have challenging patients and see what the team have to put up with, today I witnessed nurses being hit and abused from ill patients which is unacceptable although not always avoidable.

For the last three days we have requested a urine sample to see whether my grandmother's infection has re-occurred mainly because we as a family have seen her deteriorate and felt that we are being ignored, then get a locum that appeared to be hyper whether due to lack of sleep I do not know, gave us the low down on my grandmothers care, after consultation with the family stated that a further course of antibiotics would be given intraviously then they came back with antibiotics orally, not giving us much faith in the system. I have spent three hours this afternoon within the ward and found it exhausting for myself just watching what the nurse have to do because of shortages of staff not because absence and illness but due to them being expected to run the ward on a shoestring.

Please please please help the nursing staff and give them enough staff to run the wards efficiently and provide the care that they trained long and hard to do.