Helpful tips for hospital stays

[antelopevalley]

I have spent too much time in hospitals with family members and thought it might be helpful to have a thread where those with lots of experience of hospitals, can pass on tips to those with less experience.
So my top tips are -

1. If you want to pass a message on to a Dr or other medical professional on the ward, ask the student nurse to pass it on. S/he is usually looking for things to do, and far less likely to forget to pass the message on.
2. Do not make the mistake of thinking a discharge will quickly happen. If you need medication from the pharmacy, you can wait hours for it. But even the discharge letter can take a long while. Do not do what a cousin did to me. Phone asking me to pick them up saying they are getting discharged. I turned up and found out they had been told they would be discharged that day, so sat around in a hot ward, with my cousin for hours waiting for discharge papers - it was only a minor operation so she was fine.
3. If you are with someone who is terminally or seriously ill, getting there early for the ward round can be useful. Especially if things are changing fast, it is the easiest way to get daily updates about what is happening. But talk to the nurses beforehand.
4. Take notes of any important medical information and write down questions you want to ask.
5. Before having any operation ask and find out about the possible complications and how often they happen. Drs are supposed to tell you, but they do not always tell you. DP has some problems he has been left with after an operation when young - it was almost an inevitable complication, but no one told him, and he says he would have turned down the operation.
6. Unfortunately, you are more likely to get good nursing care if you are very polite and act very grateful for any help you get, interspersed with - I don't want to be a bother. If you are seen as a troublemaker your nursing care can be less good. (I am sure some nurses will deny this, but it is what I have seen over and over again in a variety of hospitals).
7. Men tend to be treated with more patience by nursing staff than women patients are. Nothing you can do about this sadly.
8. People in hospitals for a while who have lots of visitors tend to get better nursing care. So please visit people in the hospital who are there for a while.
9. Do contact PALS for help, they are very good.

I second all of that.
1.A notebook is vital.
Write down questions to ask when the doctor comes round. Don't be afraid to ask for clarification and write down what he said as soon as possible so you can refer back to it. Ask what drugs are going in the drip.
2.Keep control of your own medication if you can. If they want to change your regular meds ask why.
3.Never assume the female is a nurse and the male is a doctor. I have seen this cause so much offence to women doctors.
4 Night staff are usually agency and don't have a clue what's going on.
5 You will repeat your story many times, don't leave anything out just because you said it to the 3rd doctor before last.
6 Consultants seldom come round at weekends.

Agree that Consultants are very thin on the ground at weekends.

Genuinely gobsmacked at some of your comments and only just picked up this thread following another thread of yours where you are again moaning about health care staff.

What exactly is “trouble making” in your opinion?

I am a nurse and it is written into our code of conduct to treat others with respect, prioritise them, show compassion, communicate effectively, don’t discriminate and promote professionalism and trust amongst other principles.

There is zero tolerance to abuse on staff. If you abuse staff or treat them disrespectfully then it will not be accepted and care can be withdrawn or delayed until such a time the patient/relative agrees to co-operate respectfully and without abusing staff.

So will the essential care that I deliver to a patient suffer as a result of them being rude/trouble maker? NO

But will it make my job harder? Will I be less likely to bend the visiting rules for you? Will I be less likely to interact and be chatty? Will I be incredibly frustrated at you? Yes Yes Yes and a thousand times Yes.

HC staff are only human stop expecting them to be superhuman-feel-nothing-when-disrespected-and/or-provoked-staff.

Men do not receive better nursing care. Is this based on the assumption that the majority of HC staff are female and therefore more favourably nurse men?!

What are you basing your findings on?

Here’s a top tip for you

Treat others how you would like to be treated.

@scoobycute I did not talk about abusive patients. Interesting you made that assumption.
Anyone who spends a lot of time in hospital and is intelligent knows you get better care if you are smiley, ever so grateful and ultra polite. Being seen as compliant and grateful works.
I have seen other patients treated less well because they do not realise this. Questioning nurses a lot, being a bit irritable, taking help for granted, asking for help too much. All get you seen as difficult.
Not just my view either. A friend who spends a lot of time in hospital, a very intelligent assertive woman has told me she purposely does the -
" I am so sorry to bother you, I don't mean to be a pain, but I could really do with some water.! And when they bring it "Thank you so much, you all take such good care of us. Thank you so much."
Because it gets her better nursing care.

And in general, nurses are more patient with male patients. I see it again and again.

This is not moaning about healthcare staff. It is tips for patients. You will get better care if you are aware of the above.
The one about getting better care when you have lots of visitors was said to me by an elderly neighbour decades ago. I was sceptical then, but as long as your visitors are polite and respectful it is true.

And I am not talking about basic care. Of course all patients get bed sheets changed, given food, get medicines and tests. I am talking about good nursing which is much more than that.

Zero abuse on staff refers not only to patients but relatives alike. And abuse can be verbal and non-compliance.

If you are polite and grateful and compliant..of course staff will interact with you in the same way back? And I repeat..Treat others how you would like to be treated? Can't you see that?

Being decent and polite and grateful are things most adults have grasped in life already...not a new fangled "tip" only to be whipped out in order to receive "superior nursing care".

Glad all of these findings are based on you, your friend and an elderly neighbours opinion 👍🏼

You consider non-compliance is abusive behaviour? Blimey.

In a professional setting I do not think you should have to show how grateful you are for everything a nurse does for you. And seriously ill people struggle to not be at all irritable.
But glad you have confirmed that you have confirmed what I am saying is true.

Non-co-operative is perhaps a more fitting word. And it will impact on care you receive.

Failing to observe non smoking policy, failing to get a PCR test for covid, failing to fast for surgery, use of illicit drugs within the premises etc etc etc.

If you're on a lot of medication, take a prescription or prescription request form in with you, to show them what you're taking. If you're in a bad way, you may not remember all the drugs or doses. I always took my DH's with me; one time the doctor left four of his drugs off the ward chart, and prescribed 3 others he wasn't even on!

@sueelleker That was why I posted about monitoring your drugs and questioning changes. It's worth a relative making sure that list gets past on. I was too ill to tell them I was on steroids. I carry a card and I have an alert on my phone but it was two days before they noticed.

When my mother went in and out of hospital she always came home with different medicine regimes, more than once a vital drug was missed.

I have a lot of medication for various things. When I was in hospital last year I never once got my drugs at the right time. I am perfectly capable of managing my own and it worked fine once they agreed to that. Obviously not everyone can do that or is well enough.

@scoobycute I absolutely agree that all HCPs and other staff should be treated with courtesy and as you would wish to be treated. I witnessed some unspeakably rude behaviour from other patients. Racism, sexism and just bad tempered unpleasantness.

@scoobycute I was thinking of non-compliant behaviour like not wanting to go for a shower or questioning or refusing a particular medication.
Although someone who is a drug addict can not go cold turkey.

@SortingOffice Most of my experience is in wards with seriously ill people and I have not seen that. I have seen patients being treated dismissively after they were irritable, confused, shouting out or complaining about their treatment. My mum said she saw one paraplegic woman left for hours in a chair in a very uncomfortable position until her husband came in and sorted it. The same woman was seen negatively by the staff as she complained about her treatment in a "whingy" voice. The woman discharged herself against medical advice to get away.
Although in general, the higher the band, the better care they provide. And a ward in the same hospital can be very different depending who is running it.
I am sure in wards with people able to interact easily, that some are sexist, racist or rude. Not all the public are nice people.

You keep throwing out generalisations that you are treating as fact like "the higher the band the better care they provide" and these generalisations are based on one off observational cases or hearsay.

And if a patient refused a shower or medications, I would think nothing if it nor would I treat them any different to the next patient. I would just try the next day.

I have nursed seriously ill (confused/delirious/aggressive/restless) patients in a hospice for years and have been nursing for 14 years.

I can tell you now that nurses on the whole are very caring, attentive, empathetic and hardworking people with the odd few (like in any place of work) that let the team down or give us a bad name.

HCP are real people with real feelings and contrary to your belief that they don't require patients to be grateful of the care receive, a thank you goes a long way. And speaking from experience, the large majority of patients are very thankful of the care they have received which makes my job even more special.

Your generalisations are not factual, opinion based, and offensive on the whole. Everybody has a sad story of a HCP not fulfilling their role or acting poorly and I could tell you a few.

Your original post is in bad taste and I get the impression you have had a bad day and you are just venting about your personal experience rather than actually equipping any MNers with actual tips.