I love our NHS, I do, but OMG my experience this afternoon...

[NewMatress]

DH admitted yesterday. Long story, but he usually has his pain managed by the hospice and is generally comfortable. I gave the hospital the hospice discharge letter with a list of his prescribed meds, when he was admitted.

He's been calling me c. every hour crying with pain and begging to come home. I've spoken to the nurse in charge a number of time asking what's gone so wrong with his pain management. She's been quite rude saying that he's getting everything prescribed.

Anyway, eventually a McMillian nurse called me to check the dose as she thought the break through pain relief dose was low. It turns out they've been using a liquid with a concentrate of only 1/10 of the one he's actually prescribed. I.e his prescription is for 5ml of a 10mg per ml liquid every hour and they've been giving him 5ml of a 1mg per ml liquid.

Once we got to the bottom of that I thought he'd be more comfortable, but when I went to visit him this evening, he's still crying with pain because at 6:30 he was still waiting for the breakthrough pain relief he'd asked for at 3:30. The nurse told me it was because it needs a 2nd sign off as a controlled drug, which I understand, so get one! At which point she said well discharge yourself then. I'll get a doctor and you discharge yourself. The doctor never came, I'd love to talk to to a doctor, no one has yet been able to tell me why DH is still there, as they've established the chest pain he was admitted with is nothing more sinister than his usual cancer pain.

When he did eventually get the pain relief, both nurses were quite rude to me about my impatience and one accused me of saying I wanted her to lose her job, which was simply not true. I said I wanted her to do what was needed to get the pain relief I.e. find a second person.

Meantime, the man in the bed opposite as begging for help the whole time I was there. He has no use of his hands and no one would help him with a drink (I did) and when they brought his dinner they just left it for him with no means to actually eat it. I marked my card again by insisting that someone help him.

I'm exhausted and I'm not the one who's ill. Don't tell me everyone in the NHS is an angel. I get it's tough but this is simply not OK.

@YouokHun

I suspect lots of PP would be happy to pay higher taxes to fund the NHS better, I would. I also feel there’s lots of areas the government could cut spending, in order to fund the NHS properly

How about HS2 which currently has an estimated total cost of just over £100billion?

Friend's ex was a surgeon in the NHS and the stories he used to tell me about mismanagement were unimaginable.

Layers and layers of middle managers. The left hand didn't know what the right was doing. Bureaucracy up to their ears.

Most people bleating about giving the NHS more money have no idea how funding actually works. For a start, hospitals must bill their NHS trusts for each patient they treat. Except the billing department - who aren't doctors - regularly underbill because they don't understand the forms they've been handed by the doctors.

That's before you get to the cronyism, waste etc. if you think Matt Hancock giving his mates PPE contracts is shocking you have literally no idea what happens within the NHS at procurement level.

Threads like this make me so worried for people who have nobody to advocate for them.

I’m so sorry that your husband was treated like this OP but he is so bloody lucky to have you and that you were able to visit and get to the bottom of what was going on.

I absolute dread to think of what some patient ‘care’ has been like behind closed doors when visiting was stopped because of the pandemic.

I’m due to give birth soon, planning to do so at home but he idea of being on a ward without my DH and potentially unable to advocate for myself really scares me based on previous experiences as an inpatient.

That's shocking. It is why the NHS doesn't need more money, it just needs competent staff who aren't lazy and actually give a shit. Complain, they'll apologise and will trot out the we'll learn from it line but they really won't!!

@Twinkie01 better funding would result in better training and therefore better staff. At the moment too many students are roed into care roles for which they are not yet qualified because of underfunding of staffing levels.

I cancelled a much needed surgery as due to lack of visiting during covid, my previous experience told me I wouldn’t get medication or basic care or even fluids if I didn’t have a family member there to help me. Terrifies me the thought of going back in and I’ll get worse without surgery

When I go out to restaurants I often think to myself isn't it strange how they're so well staffed and managed compared to our hospitals. Priorities of society...

I work in vet medicine, about 10 years ago I was working in a referral hospital and my mum was waiting on an oncology referral. I remember thinking I can see a dog, send it for an mri scan, diagnose and start treatment all with 24/48 hours. I actually became so disillusioned at how insane the disparity was I left the industry for a few years. I still think there is something very wrong when I know with almost certainty that my cat will never have to suffer at the end of her life but my parents likely will.

I'm so sorry for your experience OP, unfortunately it is not surprising to me, I could tell many many similar stories. I hope your DH is currently pain free .

I nearly lost my mother a month ago due to the treatment in her ward by the nurses. A meeting with her consultant soon changed that.

Attitude to pain management is bizarre. Men for back pain get it often, but anyone with a serious condition or just had their body sliced open is expected to shut up on paracetamol.

Worse was the nurse doing the nighttime drug round walking around saying “I hate my job, would have been okay if I married a rich man”. I was a young person with visitors and speaking to someone for 30secs on a drug round genuinely helped. The blind lady next to me didn’t even know the nurse had been round. Me and others on the ward ha to push her food/drink/meds in front of her the majority of the time.

Oh and fucking sleep. I get it’s a shit job and you all hang out at the nurses station ignoring the buzzers. But fucking stop laughing and screeching. We’re in here as we’re sick, we’re knackered and you wake us at 6am so for the love of god unless it’s noise seeing to a patient (really really ok) stop the fucking noise and let us sleep. You’ve already come in and laid out your magazines in the desk for the night.

I believe from experience no nurse should be allowed to work night shifts only, as they deskill and avoid the jobs the nurses during tr day have to do. Patients would get out of hospital if some of the long term night nurses actually filled in assessments and discharge paperwork over night that the poor day staff are too busy to fill in. Not treating a night shift like a sit down to read magazines for 6hours. I know the majority of nurses aren’t like this, but no one calls out the ones that are. Well negligent.

No one complains as an inpatient as you are genuinely scared of getting less care or retaliation.

In the labour wards, the ward assistants would sometimes put drinks to women whod had Csections out of their reach so unable to get it.
i marked my card by pointing that out,
I couldn't nurse my newly born baby because i was so heavily drugged, i left alone in the dark with a bottle of formula, how i didn't drop him ill never know.

This happens all the time, so none of us should be surprised.

I'm so sorry you are in this situation. Complain. And we need to start having difficult conversations as a society about what we need from the NHS and how to get it.

I'm a recently retired palliative care nurse and these stories fill me full of sadness and horror. I have worked with nurses who had a very poor attitude towards pain relief and no basic empathy.

I fear the NHS systems and its staff are causing a great deal of avoidable suffering.

OP, I would advise you to put a complaint in.

I’m so sorry you and your DH are having to go through this OP. I haven’t got any helpful advice but just felt moved to say that I completely recognise your description of the ‘care’ given by some parts/people in the NHS. It isn’t acceptable on any level and identifying such inhumanity and obstructiveness isn’t the same as saying the concept of the NHS is flawed etc which some people seem to use as an argument against improving the NHS. Sending every positive thoughts to you both

This kind of standard of care seems to be more the norm to me than compassionate care (and I have met some fantastic , lovely nurses) but tbh I’ve seen them dump food on someones table who can’t move and was suffering from sepsis. It took me 45 min to get a nurse to leave the station 20 feet away to adjust his bed properly so he could eat. They were literally just standing around chatting about their personal lives.

I’ve had a hospital stay in a different country and the experience was vastly different. Care in the NHS is often brutal.

Why does everyone here go on about how much they love the nhs? We all have similar awful examples of a lack of care. When my elderly aunt was in hospital, we had to constantly beg for pain relief and other help, yet the nurses sat at their station chatting most of the time. It was quite shocking.

This was pre Covid too.

So sorry to hear your story, OP, but sadly not surprised. I think your point about not complaining while you’re still dependent on the hospital is fair - I would raise your concerns via the consultant not through nursing staff or PALS. When my child had cancer they were seen in 5 different hospitals and in my experience bad care is principally about culture not funding, and culture is driven by the tone at the top. And as PPs have mentioned - the problem is invariably the nursing staff, ignoring buzzers, ignoring instructions from doctors, screeching and bantering all night behind their desks; letting syringe drivers beep at night for hours,; ignoring patients and their families queuing up at the desk. The senior nurses allow this culture in too many (in my life experience, most) hospitals.
Where they don’t, the NHS can indeed be fantastic.

YANBU @NewMatress absolutely awful. But meds in hospital are a joke anyway. I had a 5yo post tonsillectomy readmitted for bleeding. The admitting dr didnt write up nurofen for him, so the nurses couldn’t give it apparently. It took them 6 hours to track down a dr to sign it off. All the while I had a distraught little boy all for the want of an OTC painkiller. [hospital pharmacy don’t sell any paracetamol/ibuprofen OTC so I couldn’t even get some myself, and it was late into the evening when the problem was spotted meaning I was stuck without any help from home]

use the NHS choices & go choose & book to my local private hospital where I have had 5 ops & received excellent care,
@nat6999 how does this work?

@Mango101 there's a good in between than the NHS And the private healthcare of the states, we have it here in Australia.

That would never happen on my shift! Pain relief would be number one priority! Being kind doesn’t take any more effort than being rude and dismissive...bloody shocking ,destroys my faith in human nature.

90% of the issues on here concern nurses, either they are lazy, lack compassion or thoughtless. None of the other professions attract the same number of complaints on here be it physios, medics or speech therapists. Why is this and what is the answer ?

In my opinion more nurses = less stress, better working conditions = staff feel valued, less paperwork that's there just to cover the trust's back = more time to spend with patients, introducing IT systems that are totally unworkable and double the amount of documentation doesn't help, better funding overall because poor service/staff shortages elsewhere ie in pharmacy impact further down the line and affect quality of care, all those things would improve the patient's experience. Quite clearly there are some nurses totally unsuited to the job who absolutely should have been weeded out much earlier during training. The sad thing is that it's actually time consuming and emotionally demanding to initiate the termination of someone's training, there are many hoops to jump through and some just don't want that hassle.

How distressing for your poor dh
I’m a regular user of the nhs and some wards are brilliant and some are shit!

Reading threads like this is very upsetting, but important I think. Is there anyone in this country who doesn't have an experience, whether their own or a family member, of sub-standard care? And this isn't like getting crap service in a restaurant, it can be life or death obviously, but more than that it's people at their most vulnerable being treated like this. I can't bear the way this seems to be so endemic. I know funding is part of it, but it's not the whole story is it? How can we change this?
OP I'm so sorry your husband had to go through that. Unforgivable. Don't go to PALS, in my experience they're good at making the right noises but not there to actually help you.

I can't get through to him this morning. Or I did once, but could only hear groaning, which was absolutely not how he was before he went in.

I spoke to the the nurse who's leading his "care", the same one as yesterday and she had attitude before I even spoke. "What do you want?" I very politely (I mean really, very politely) asked how he is this morning and if there was an update on his discharge. "Settled, talk about discharge tomorrow". I still don't why he needs to be there and I guess it's normal to have to wait until Monday, but if he's settled why is he groaning and unable to speak on the phone? She insists it's because he's sleeping. "He's got a health condition of course he going to groan". I hope he is asleep.

Visiting strictly between 6 & 7.

He does actually have private medical insurance, but I don't know how to go about getting him on a path for private care or even if it would make a difference.