The GP practice that, that, that I use is one which has I think maybe five partners for example and then other doctors as well. So there are quite a lot of people involved. And in general one can never be sure of seeing the same doctor twice. Generally speaking the, the communication between the doctors in this area is quite good. But recently we found it was a good move to try and involve one doctor more perhaps. And so now that I'm pretty much housebound, we try to arrange for the same doctor to come every now and again, just to sort of keep in touch with a home visit. And that system has worked reasonably well so far. We also have a, a district, a district nurse come in once a week from the same, they, they, they work from, out of the same practice. And that's been working very well. In fact it has to be said that the, the district nurses have been a tower of strength when it comes to fighting our corner with problems with the agency for example or with the local Social Services or whatever. They really have been very supportive. And I would encourage anybody to get them, get the district nurses to work for you.
On the whole the services have worked quite well. Where I have some reservations is in the communication between them and in making sure that we actually get what we need when we need it and so on. The district nurse has obviously been very important in bullying various other organisations. Likewise the local MND clinic coordinator at the local hospital has been extremely good at sort of fighting our corner for us and good at making suggestions and so on. That said, a huge amount of mental energy and emotional energy has been consumed at our end I think by making sure that we do get what we want. Things, it has to be said, have not worked very well in some respects, like the length of time it's taken to get particular care arrangements in place. Problems with the agency not always being able to provide staff, so you get a phone call perhaps rather late in the day saying, “We can't provide anybody tonight” something like that. And making sure you get the right kind of staff. Where we've had some interesting experiences has been, been in, simply in the selection of staff. We've had people suggested to us as night sitters for example who from past experience we know sleep very heavily and have to be more or less kicked awake. So that's obviously not a very satisfactory arrangement for sort of night sitting, where, particularly if you, for any reason if I lose control of the sort of bell push for example, I wouldn't be able to wake them if I had any problems.
We also had somebody who, coming sort of, coming one night, partly to find out whether she could sleep through the night, so she was coming in effectively for assessment by us when we had another night sitter in, so this would be a, a new potential night sitter, went into complete panic mode and got very confused about where she was and so on. Which again would not have been a very satisfactory arrangement if I have any kind of emergency. So we've had to do quite a lot of rather careful vetting of, of staff and things like that. |
