Hospitals show lack of care when discharging patients, report finds

A report published by Healthwatch, entitled ‘Safely Home: What happens when people leave hospital and care settings?’, examined the experience of over 3,000 patients who were elderly, homeless or suffering from mental health problems. It highlighted that hospital staff often fail to ensure that patients have a safe place to be discharged to, fail to pass on new medications to GPs and carers and fail to notify family members when patients are discharged.

One case study included a mentally ill man who was discharged after a suicide attempt, with no follow up care, who killed himself a week later. Another case saw an 81 year old man who had suffered a severe stroke being sent home in a taxi at 10.30pm without notifying his family, and another found that a cancer patient was sent back to an unheated home in mid-winter and was found struggling to breath by a nurse who had to break into his flat.
 
The report found that many patients feel discriminated against and were often not involved in decisions regarding their ongoing care, leaving them feeling “rushed out of the door”.

Anna Bradley, Healthwatch chair, said: “This is not a new problem, but what makes these findings worse, is that in many cases some pretty basic things could have made all the difference.

“There is a huge human and financial cost of getting discharge wrong. We hope that the increased focus on integration of health and social care, and pressure on finances, will create a new impetus to fix it.”

Responding to the report, Chief Executive & General Secretary of the Royal College of Nursing Dr Peter Carter said: “This thorough report highlights an important issue for the health service. Sadly this will not come as a surprise to nursing staff, who all too often discharge a healthy patient only to see them return to hospital with complications caused by a lack of community care and support. With the right support in the community, and properly resourced staff who can be responsible for coordinating discharge, patients are less likely to return to hospital, relieving the pressures on the frontline.”
 
Phil McCarvill, deputy policy director of the NHS Confederation, said: “Every patient has a story about their care and the vast majority are positive, but when it goes wrong it’s often because of gaps and boundaries which exist across the health and care system.
 
“Our members are already making progress in connecting different health services and delivering individualised, person-centred care, and will be keen to reflect on Healthwatch’s findings.
 
“The scale and complexity of the NHS can sometimes make the experience of care feel less tailored to individual’s needs. Delivering compassionate, dignified care must be the top priority of everyone who works in the NHS and change is needed wherever patients’ experience falls below that standard. There’s no one-size-fits-all solution so we need local leaders to continue working with key partners, such local authorities and the voluntary sector, to shape services and ensure the delivery of care in the right way, the right place and at the right time.”

Read more