Returned from Hospital with no teeth

[norma1980]

My very elderly dad fell in the early hours and an ambulance took him in.

He was kept in A&E for the day and then dropped home later that day.

The people who dropped him home left him in living room and said he wasn't allowed upstairs without assistance and someone would be there within the hour to help him. No one has attended yet.

He was also returned home without his teeth.

He has no spare pair. No dentist.

I phoned hospital (I don't live in the country) and they said "it happens all the time" (lost teeth) and they can't find them. No idea what happened to them. He definitely went to hospital with them.

I know things happen but I've now a very elderly man who has no teeth and will be on soup for god knows how long.

I've called GP and local dentists and no one can help.

GP told me to call PALS and that's it.

Anyone experience anything similar please?

It is so wasteful of NHS resources too as some of these aids will have been provided by the NHS and will need to be replaced by the NHS.

Further NHS resources will be wasted looking for the lost items (if they bother), responding to complaints and dealing with patients who now have additional/more complex needs.

I'm so sorry. Good for you for fighting through. I've started talking to the innovation centre at our trust about some form of tracking system for them, but I agree a locked safe is much simpler. Staff simply understanding how important it is would go a long way.

Unfortunately some elderly people arrive with very loose dentures, often from long term malnutrition, and at that point they are dangerous for the patient to keep in their mouths unless they are fully with it - they can be swallowed. So those do have to be taken out. But I agree mostly it's just they get lost in the bedding.

The simple, low tech solution is to make sure every patient has a named, labelled denture pot that dentures are put in. That dentures are noted and denture care is part of nursing care.

The big problem is that health care workers do not like mouth or denture care. A survey of nurses showed they would rather deal with faeces than dentures .

As a patient gets more elderly their muscle tone gets worse and so the dentures do not stay in as well. Add to that is that it can be difficult to persuade patients with dementia to keep the dentures in. Therefore they get taken out, put in tissues and then binned. Weight loss does not affect denture fit.

The problem is that dentures require muscle control to keep them in and when a very elderly patient loses their old faithfuls quite often it is impossible for them to get used to a new set .

Labelling dentures helps , as does having a copy set made , particularly if they have dementia . But mouth and denture care need to be part of standard nursing care for the elderly.

The sad thing is it is such a simple problem to sort ie labelled pots , and has been picked up as a problem many,many times https://www.england.nhs.uk/primary-care/dentistry/management-and-prevention-of-denture-loss/