I’m in A&E for assessment for something. I’ve been put on a sort of holding ward which seems to be for people who they deem to need monitoring/regular obs while waiting for the doctor or maybe who cannot wait in the normal waiting room for some reason.
Theres an elderly man opposite me who has been brought in because he had a fall. He’s almost completely deaf (hence why I know all the details as he has to shout to hear himself and the nurses have to shout for him to hear them). He wants to go home and they’re saying he’s “not allowed” because they have to be sure he’s not going to fall again. I understand that and they need to put his safety first. He occasionally tries to get up to walk and they come over and sit him back down. This is not entirely consensual on his part from what I can tell but at the same time I understand that they can’t allow him to potentially fall again and injure himself.
The thing that is making me a bit uncomfortable about how he’s being treated is that he keeps asking for someone to phone his wife. He’s saying that he wants her to get a taxi here to be with him and so she’s not at home alone. Other people on this ward have relatives with them so in theory it seems like she could be here too. He is able to very clearly explain to the nurses what he wants them to say to his wife on the phone. Each time he asks “have you phoned my wife” someone says “not yet but I’ll go and do it now” or occasionally “we’ll phone her in a bit but we’re very busy”. Each time they have this conversation he tries to persuade them again that they need to phone her, and the discussion between him and the nurse takes longer than it would for them to just bloody phone her. Nurses are chatting happily with other patients, I have had offers of cups of tea etc and they don’t seem particularly under the kosh.
To be clear, I’m aware that with older people there may be issues I don’t know but it doesn’t seem to be a case of eg he’s got dementia and is asking them to phone his wife who actually died ten years ago. I’ve overheard the nurses saying to each other “are you gonna phone her” “yeah I’ll do it in a bit” etc. This has been going on for over an hour. I know nurses are extremely busy but they have had multiple conversations with him about this now all of which have taken longer than a phone call to his wife. It makes me feel so uneasy that he’s basically begging them to phone his wife and they either lie and say “I’ll do it now” then don’t or they say “I’ll do it in a little while”. He’s quite upset and every time someone goes past he pleads “will someone please just quickly phone my wife”.
I feel awful for him as he has no mobile phone, he says his eyesight is too bad to text and he cannot hear on the phone so I can’t even just offer him my own phone to allow him to call her. I feel like I need to say something but also don’t want to make their jobs even harder. WWYD? It must be such a horrible feeling for him to be pleading with them and worrying about his wife alone at home and to just keep being ignored.