When she was transferred to the general ward it was like chalk and cheese. It is absolutely unbelievable. And you are so elated that she is coming out of Intensive Care, that she is on the road to recovery. That is all you can think of. And then you go to the general ward and there isn't the level of nursing care. There is ignorance, in the true sense of the word, about the condition of Intensive Care patients. There is not the level of medical cover for the patient. The mix of patients is so dramatically different that it can be off putting and there are articles written on this, there is evidence to prove that this is the situation. And it really is.
And people leaving Intensive Care, I mean the evidence is there, even after seven days the amount of muscle loss that people have is incredible and after 49 nights, I mean she was physically a wreck, she couldn't walk or do anything. There was no proper physiotherapy on the general ward, she was given a Zimmer frame with no instructions, no support how to use it. There was no assistance to get her to the bathroom or anything like that at all. She had to struggle out of bed to sit in a chair if she wanted to because she was encouraged to get out of the bed. There wasn't any visit from the physiotherapist except for a flying visit which had to be organised. And there was no psychological input into trying to guide her through from the transition problems that she was facing after being in Intensive Care. And the enormous amount of sedative drugs that she'd been on which do affect them, which we now know. So there was none of that at all in the general ward and I think that is a fair criticism of most hospitals up and down the country, talking to patient groups about this, the transition between the two is so dramatic it can have very serious consequences in terms of patient recovery. And it was the situation there to the extent that I arranged for my wife to be moved out of there fairly quickly.
But before I could do that, it was unbelievable the hurdles I had to leap through. She was transferred to the general ward under the care of a renal physician. She was in Intensive Care for respiratory problems. So to a simple logical mind she should have been transferred to a respiratory physician. But no, because on the day she came through A & E there was a renal physician on take and she went back to him. The renal physician had done ward rounds about two hours before my wife was admitted to the general ward and didn't come back for two days. The juniors were just running around like chickens with their heads cut off. So I couldn't get the renal physician back to check her out, anyway she said it is not my area of expertise, you need to speak to the respiratory physicians. So I tracked down the respiratory physician and got one of the nurses in critical care to lean on the respiratory physician to come and see her, who did a couple of days later. And as far as he was concerned, from a lung point of view, she was fine and she could go home. But the renal physician would have to clear it. So basically we got the renal physician in, so she cleared it and my wife was transferred to a private facility which provided physiotherapy and psychology. And the physiotherapy was geared particularly to functional respiration to get her back to normal. So she was there for ten days being treated privately. |
