To think the nurses shouldn't keep telling my uncle that my dying grandma is sitting up in bed and eating?

[deaconblue]

My grandma is 88 and has been in hospital with a chest infection. My mum and 2 brothers were told yesterday she probably only has 48 hours to live. My other uncle lives further away and has been ringing to check on her. Yesterday he was told her SATS were much improved (they are significantly worse) and this morning he was told she was sitting up in bed, having eaten a good breakfast (not true, she can't sit up and hasn't eaten for 4 days)
If staff do not know the answer to a relative's question why on earth do they not go and find out an accurate answer? He had decided not to make the 2 hour trip today because of what he was told this morning and now may not make it before she dies.

LovestheChaos -yeh I am a nurse too and you have explained the problem perfectly.
We try to do out best but in the circumstances sometimes it is very very difficult.

I'm pretty sure there isn't a law that says nurses can't give information over the phone. What there is, is a law that says you can only use the information for the purposes you hold it for and you can only give it to people who are authorised to have it in line with what you have it for - iyswim. That's the principle behine the data protection act. So nurses absolutely can't give it out information at whim nor should they be giving out inaccurate information.

Op - so sorry to hear about your grandma

I'm sorry to hear about your grandmother but your threadtitle is misleading. You said the nurses "keep telling my uncle" but then go on to explain this has happened once.
The telephone is not the best way to communicate, can't you phone your uncle?
Do let the staff know that you are upset.
I once spent an entire night shift watching a lady who had deteriorated thinking when shall I call the family, not wanting to drag them out in the middle of the night and left it until 6am, they arrived just before I left work and were pleased I'd called.
I went in that night and she was sitting up in bed eating weetabix, I felt so stupid!
She'd just briefly rallied and died the next day.
I hope you grandmother and her family are being treated well.

But Northern Lurker how can you know the identity of the person at the other end of the phone? We had people calling to get information about patients. They claim they are a brother or a sister of the patient. Then you find out the patient is an only child. Next thing you know the patient is suing for confidentiality breaches.

I was told by my employer that no information can be given over the phone (unless you are 100% sure who you are talking to) and that it is a "sackable" offense.

Not the same as a 'law' though.

Yeah law was a bad word to use. I trained in the United States and I am thinking if Hippa.

which obviously doesn't apply here.

No the nurse shouldn't have said this but I'm sure they wouldn't have done on purpose. Sounds like a mistake.

Have to say though if you're there and ringing him daily why is he ringing the ward. On a 40 bedded ward if every patient had a relative ringing up every day for an update it gets to the stage where as a nurse you can't get any work done. Yes I can understand it if all the relatives are far away and noone can get in but in this case he should be happy with the updates from you.

Northernlurker there is patient confidentiality which means that legally no relative is entitled to know anything about the condition of a patient without that patients express consent.

Giving information out to relatives over the phone is not approved off, due to confidentiality and the fact that the persons id is not verifiable over the phone.

Shoppingbags sorry about your Grandma, hope you uncle gets there.

Nellie and loves - I agree with you. I work in the NHS too and apply confidentiality every day. It is simply unworkable however to never tell anything to anybody over the phone. What you must do is be extremely cautious about what is said - a point many of my colleagues sadly seem to miss The point I wanted to make was that there is no point of law that says nurses can't talk on the phone

thats a good thought, a law that says nurses cant talk on the phone!

There are ways and means of identifying family members over the phone and as a staff nurse I would always try to identify who I was speaking to and where possible involve the patient.

Where possible it is extremely useful to nominate one person to maintain contact with the ward and then pass the information onto other family members as answering the phone to one relative after another is very disruptive but again this isn't possible in every situation.

That is the usual practice in our hospital gail - nurse goes and asks patient are you ok for me to speak with x and then you go from there. Much harder if the patient is v unwell but then there's often a family member around in that case, who can deal with the enquiry or verify it. It's very hard because as the op's case shows - getting the wrong information is very serious and lots of people have relatives scattered far and wide who do need updates.

Absolutely NL. One ward I worked on used a password system which worked well.

Yes the OPs situation is sad and unfortunately does happen. Obviously got their patients mixed up which sadly does happen

We do tell relatives that patients have died. I was always very truthful with my patients relatives - what's the point in lying? I have also been on the receiving end when we were called to say my Grandad had significantly deteriorated and we should come up only to get a phone call 10 minutes later to say he had gone.

OP I am so sorry you are going through this

I am so sorry about your grandma.

When my mum was ill my dad was the only one who phoned and he got info as they knew him, and relayed it to the rest of us.
I think all patients should just have 1 relative allowed to phone the ward who then updates the rest. I don't think some relatives realise that when they phone the hospital they are dragging the nurses away from the important part of their job, nursing the sick.
Many wards don't have ward clerks, and they often aren't allowed to give any clinical info.

Yes when my dad was ill we had one relative ringing up - me. Whilst he was in the geriatric ward whoever spoke to me on the phone always gave me the wrong info. As soon as he was in intensive care they couldn't have been more helpful and more accurate. I think it is generally something to do with the way geriatric wards are run, IME.

shoppingbags - sorry about your Grandma :(

I hope your Uncle is able to spend some time with her and I hope this brings your family closer together.

They don't normally tell you over the phone. When my grandpa died earlier this year we got called in to say that things looked bad in the morning but nothing final was said. I found out later he had already died by this point but the doctors were still trying to revive him. He didn't make it and was basically already gone long before we were called. :( at least it was quick.

It does seem weird to tell someone that their relative is OK when they are not though.

YANBU, I called to ask how MIL was, told sitting in the chair chatting to the nurses.

She'd died the previous day.

Pofakkedthe chair,

On the large medical/ geriatric wards there is one RN to 15 patients. On ITU there is often more RN's on duty than there are patients. That might explain it.

lovesthechaos i can assure you that there are not more nurses on than there are patients in an ICU...ICU's have staffing problems too.

I have been the only RN on a 32 bedded surgical ward at times.

Wards are staffed by bank nurses and agency staff these days.

In ITU the patient nurse ratio is normally 1-2-1 or 1-2-2, (if staffed correctly)on a geriatric or elderly care as it's now referred to the ratio can be as bad as 2-2-32.
ITU patients, normally unconscious you get to spend a lot of time with them, visiting is restricted both in length of time and in who can visit. Its highly complex care but it is by nature highly personalised. (oh and I can tell you that if on a rare occasion there are empty beds after we would have recovered from the shock we would have been loaned out to other areas, happened once in my 3 years on an ITU, and the bed stayed empty for about an hour)

Elderly care, on a good day at least 2/3 will have some mobility, half of them you won?t want to be mobile because they?re confused, or unsteady and need supervision but don?t want to ask for help (the don?t want to bother you, you?re so busy), or refuse to acknowledge that they need help. Everyone and their neighbour can and will visit and demand information and refuse to acknowledge visiting times.
I was once walking on to a ward to borrow some equipment and was accosted (no other word for it) by a family group of about 10+ people demanding to know how Granny was. I explained that I didn?t actually work on the ward but if they told me Granny?s name when I found the nurse in charge I would get her to go and talk to them.
Perfectly reasonably I thought; the amount of abuse I received was amazing.
Including comments of ?what the fuck do you mean what?s her name, you should fucking know you work here?. Em no as I said I didn?t work on that ward, there is over 500 patients in the hospital not including out patients/ Obs & Gyne/ A&E was I expected to know the name and medical status of every single one of them?
?Typical fucking lazy bitch, why be a nurse when you don?t care about patients??
Well I do care that?s why I was there to borrow a piece of equipment to make another patient last few hours as pain free as possible.
And ?Think you?re too fucking good to actually do your job don?t you, my taxes pay your wages you know?
Well you know what I pay taxes too, so I pay my own wages. And I was trying to do my job.
Can you think of any other job where you could be spoken to like that, be physically pushed against a wall and have people shout at you so close to your face that you have spit in your hair and have to apologise to the people who did it?
These were all educated well dressed people, who felt it was acceptable to treat me in this manner.
It used to make me wonder that they thought so little of me/ nurses our knowledge/ training and education, but were happy to leave the care of the most vulnerable members of their family in our care.

Sorry for the hijack, and OP I hope that your Grandmother is doing well, but the majority of nurses are dedicated, hard working and genuinely care about their patients, like any job there will always be the bad un?s.

PS the above situation is true and was one of the final straws for me, I started looking for another job within weeks and was out of the NHS within months

Abuse of a nurse by a particular horrible family does not excuse the woeful lack of care directed towards the elderly in the NHS. I have seen it so many times, having spent an awful lot of time in geriatric wards in the last few years.

My father's experience in ITU, on the other hand, could not have been better, and we are infintely grateful to the wonderful NHS staff and resources that gave him his care there.