Woman evicted from NHS hospital ward after being stuck for 18 months

[SerendipityJane]

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c897ew0ekp4o

What a depressing article. Just demonstrates the disconnect between NHS care and social care funding. I found it sad that the hospital weren't treating her i.e there was no medical need for her to be on a ward but we see queues of patients waiting in A and E for a bed. 18 months is unforgiveable.

I read this article this morning and as PP said, it’s all so bloody depressing.

Same with the figures of people that are currently occupying hospital beds, so many that are well enough for discharge but no where to go, so spending weeks, often more time on wards when they don’t need to be there.

The thing is - the care facility she came from refused to take her back, so where was she meant to go?
It absolutely should have not taken all of this time to find her a suitable placement.
Soon as the hospital find out you have BPD you are treated like a second rate citizen, so I can believe some of the things she has said.
18 months to find her a place to go, is horrendous.
The care system is broken and this is a prime example

I just read the whole article and it looks like huge efforts were actually made to find her a place but it is clear that she has a serious personality disorder. So I am not sure this case is such a good representation of the real problems in the system.

They found a suitable placement but she refused it.

I think there's a lot more to this than the article says. For example, she's described as a wheelchair user and needing personal care but no explanation as to why this would be the case.

They did find a new placement, but only after a year!

I think there will be a huge amount more to this story than the BBC are telling. They say the patient has capacity but it doesn't sound as though they are dealing with this in a practical way. Also I can only imagine the amount of public funds this person has used up. I imagine most people would like to demand exactly what they want at someone else's expense but that's not an option available. As long as her basic needs are met then an acute hospital bed isn't the place for her. Harsh but true.

The article is infuriating at many levels. I don't know why so many hoops have to be jumped through to get to the stage where she could be forcefully removed.

i read this and was not surprised she had EUPD. There will be way more to the story than the BBC is telling and she is obviously dependent on people looking after her and craves the care and attention. I have known people like this.

"craves the care and attention"
Ugh she came from a nursing home/care home in the first place so she obviously needed a standard of care in the first place.
It's people like you with your misconceptions and judgments that give people like myself who SUFFER with bpd a bad name.

It doesn’t say they left her for a year and then looked, they looked at 120 places - that must take time. Her case was obviously incredibly complicated.

She’s clearly an extremely difficult but also vulnerable person. We have major issues with social care which successive governments have utterly failed to sort out.

Which is surely just indicative of severe and enduring mental health difficulties, and therefore requiring of support! Mentally well persons do not end up in a hospital ward for years on end.

She is one of thousands unfortunately - the only difference is she doesn’t sound like she’s in a long stay bed but there are dozens and dozens of beds across the country for people in hospital for years at a time - generally for mental health difficulties. Very, very sad but if they can’t be cared for at home, and the appropriate social care doesn’t exist, where else do they go?

There is absolutely a lot more to this story. It sounds like everyone involved bent over backwards to support her, give her a voice and find somewhere suitable. I'm sure they were all incredibly frustrated that they had to take it to such extremes to get her to leave. Even from what's written it does sound like she continually put obstacles in their path. Sometimes people don't actually want help no matter how much you try and it sounds like this was one of those times.

There are absolutely very serious problems at point of discharge (I hate the term"bed blocking") around availability of care home places/domicilary care packages. I don't think this case is at all a usual example, because no 90+ year old with mobility problems (there will be dozens if not 100s of them waiting for discharge at the moment) will be going out to a non residential setting with 24 hour care support unless they can pay for it themselves.

The hospital had to go to court to evict her and had to get the police involved in the process.

This isn't failings in NHS and adult social care this is a very complex, vulnerable person who was refusing to leave because they weren't getting what they wanted.

There are mechanisms for the NHS to charge adult social care for the bed if its a social care failing. This doesn't sound like it was.

There are vast issues in both health and social care but this sounds like a complex case management issue not a failing by anyone.

Then she needed to leave the hospital and find her own accommodation. Its not the hospitals responsibility to look after homeless people. She should have been chucked out long before 18 months.

Did you read the article?
She wasn't homeless by her own doing, when she was fit for discharge in the first place her place of care REFUSED to take her back and this is where it all started.

Yeah I read this this morning and, reading between the lines, I feel for the hospital who had to deal with this utter shambles and the council, because someone couldn't be placed, because we have no institutions anymore for people who actually need them. She seemed to want to live in hospital but there isn't a long-term hospital or institutional option for people who need it anymore and she was exceptionally hard to place due to her care needs, probably stemming from the PD.

Agree - I've been the case holder in a similar situation (many years ago when things werent nearly as dire) and in that situation the hospital issued the first notice to leave letter after about 3 months. The issue there was that the family didn't want to pay for residential care.

It sounds like she has been given a lot of leeway and all possible options have been offered but rejected.

I agree. Why was it ever the hospital's problem, they're a place for sick people with defined needs not for anyone who's refusing to leave. I can't imagine how awful it was for everyone having to be on the same ward as someone with this level of mental health needs and clutter (as an aside, why couldn't her mother take some of the clutter back to her house even if she wouldn't give her daughter a home), the staff having to answer the call button when they should have been looking after their actual patients, etc.

Again that's very common.

She was offered 24 hour supported living with 2 live in carers (basically unheard of if residential was a viable option) and refused that too.

That's when she was evicted.

It's a perfect example of asking ourselves, as a country, how far we are prepared to go, and how much should the tax payer be expected to pay, to accommodate people with personality disorders.

I don't have the answer. We obviously want to live in a caring society but tax payers' rights matter too.

Presumably because they couldn’t cope with her needs/demands? If that was the reason they refused to take her back, it’s understandable. When I first read the article, I thought it was someone I know who also has a personality disorder and uses a wheelchair (although doesn’t need one).

You can’t help people who refuse to be helped. I find it very hard to deal with the person I know. If this woman is similar, then I don’t think anywhere they found for her would have been acceptable.

Saying that isn’t saying that all people with personality disorders are like that, but sadly some have extreme problems and it’s not at all clear how to best support them.