"My fathers experience"

Some good experiences but some bad too for my father in ward 12. The medical care was excellent and the nurses were friendly and caring towards him.

But we had great concerns about the communication between staff regarding his care.

On admission to the ward both my brother and myself had provided the nursing staff with an overview of the care plan that my father had at home relating to his mobility and continence management. He had been assessed and had a plan of care for this in the community with Nurses and Physios involved. Surely it must be written down somewhere. This story was reiterated to nursing staff on many occasions during his admission.

He was in the ward for 2 weeks and not once did he have the correct continence aids used despite being informed of this on many occasions. This led to an increase in laundry and of course great distress for my father.

The physio care was not much better as they were trying to mobilise him without his prescribed caliper etc.

There were also issues on discharge with medications not prescribed properly for discharge and the staff ordering a 1 man ambulance with no whellchair access and expecting my father to try and get in it. They obviously had not considered his needs properly when arranging this!

My biggest concern is the basics of nurses introducing themselves by name on the phone and in person when you are on the ward. I saw the # my name is .... all over the place but unfortunately the nurses seemed to not think it was that important.

With a nursing role myself this poor communication really concerns me as all the good work the staff put in to create a caring environment is lost by bad communication.

I had issues with communication in this hospital when my mum was in many years ago and frankly it has not improved one bit after promises that our complaint at that time would be acted upon.

I am able to advocate for my elderly father and know the system. I am concerned for the old people with no families or for those who find it hard to navigate through the system.

I had thought of formally complaining but of course we had a bad experience with that in the past so decided to use patient opinion in this case.