I'd have loved a service where you can pay professional "carers" to go into hospitals and sit with the patient to look after and advocate for them.
We've had problems three times with respective parents. We are just the two of us, no local siblings, no aunts/uncles/cousins etc. So whenever one of our parents went into hospital, planned or emergency, there was no one else besides us.
My father in law had two very long spells in hospital. Both led to formal complaints as the "care" and treatment provided was laughable. He wasn't even "that" old, first time he hadn't even retired yet getting them to do anything was sheer hard work as they seemed content to just leave him to die! It all blew up one night when we got the phone call that he may not make it through the night and that we'd better go to see him a "final" time. When we got there, having only been there for visiting time a few hours earlier, they'd removed his drips and taken him off his oxygen mask. We asked why they'd stopped "treating" him and the nurse just said the doctor had decided it wasn't worth trying to save him. We went ballistic, insisted they get a doctor to speak to us immediately, and one finally turned up, and we had a long talk, and this doctor looked at his charts etc, and said something like "maybe we should give him another try" and they moved him to ICU and put him back on drips and oxygen, and he came round, left ICU after a few days, back on a different ward and finally discharged after a couple of weeks more, eventually getting back to going back to work! The "overnight" doctor who'd made the decision to stop treatment had just taken it upon himself for no obvious reason. We were utterly gobsmacked that they could do that in a hospital! Formal complaint #1 upheld but as always "lessons will be learned"!!
Second time several years later he was diagnosed with cancer, and spent over a year in and out of hospital wards before they finally did the operation that they should have done within, I think it was at the time, the 16/18 week time frame! In reality they kept moving him between hospitals, discharging, then re-admitting, then changing the treatment, etc to "reset the clock". All the while he was deteriorating. Finally got a date for the operation, only for it to be cancelled on the morning due to the surgeon being on a course! As if they didn't know he was booked in on a course - sheer incompetence again. As most of the year he was in two different hospitals, neither in our home town, and one an hour away, we couldn't visit more than once a day, and only for an hour or two, so we weren't there to advocate for him and he couldn't really tell us what was happening as he was deteriorating. Nurses were often unhelpful and kept saying glib answers like "as well as expected" when we asked detailed health questions. Being there when a doctor was around was like shooting fish in a barrel - they showed up randomly and we couldn't "book" an appointment so we'd go weeks without seeing a doctor. Formal complaint #2 uphead and surprise surprise "lessons will be learned"!!
Finally, DM was blue lighted to A&E with double pneumonia and abandoned on a trolley in a corridor for a whopping 48 hours. One of us had to stay with her 24/7 as no one was feeding her or giving her water, no one was taking her to the loo, no one was doing anything for her actually. Not even a drip nor oxygen, whilst she was wheezing and struggling to breath. After the first few hours, we literally grabbed a doctor and insisted they do something, as literally no one had been near since the initial triage. A few hours later, they finally put her on a drip and gave her an oxygen mask. Then it was night time and no one came near again. Next morning, we expected some action, but the second day was just the same. We had to buy her drinks from the vending machine. No one even came to do obs, take her pulse, do blood pressure, etc. Whenever we asked a passing nurse, it was always "the doctor will be coming shortly" but no one ever did. Then it was the second overnight still with no care/attention at all. By the third day, we started to make a really big fuss and in the evening they finally put her on a ward where she at last started to get proper care, regular obs, some IV antibiotics etc., but it was too late and she died on that third night. No only were we devastated, we were traumatised from 2 nights without sleep and the total lack of care. Formal complaint #3 - in progress, but no doubt lessons will be learned.
In all of those cases, we'd have loved to have someone who could have gone and spent time, making notes, advocating, acting as a conduit for passing information as to who's said what and what's been done etc., as it's exhausting when there's only 1 or 2 of you to spend hours by the bedside. With MIL, we actually phoned social services and a few local care providers to ask if there was such a service of sitting with/advocating for someone in hospital and they all said that there was no such service and they couldn't help!