I am so sorry for your loss, and as a retired health professional, sorry that you were so let down by those looking after Hayley.
I think your suggestion of a Rapid Response team is good, but whiIst I understand that you want to improve standards of paediatric nursing, I would like to see this concept extended to patients of all ages.
I have had experience of poor care in both my late father and my late brother. Dad was unrousable with a very low blood sugar on the ward (he was diabetic) and the chap opposite said he had just “slept” through lunch, and the ward staff just served his meal and took it away untouched. If my brother hadn’t turned up to visit him, who knows when they might have checked on him?
And my brother himself was admitted to a series of temporary beds with atrial fibrillation, and was shunted on to another temporary bed 3 times in in 24 hours, with no-one seeming to check on him. He probably should have had cardioversion, but it was left too late. The drugs given to control the heart rhythm were omitted because the nurse (on a day surgical ward where he was temporarily lodged, not a medical ward) checked his pulse at the wrist, not centrally, after which he got him up out of bed at 6am to make way for a day case admission that day. He wasn’t being continuously monitored. He was only 52. When I rang, having travelled for 5 hours, before visiting him to ask if he if he needed anything, the male nurse who answered told me he couldn’t understand the question because he was too deaf. My brother wasn’t deaf, the nurse was speaking to the old gentleman in the next bed.
Not just the children
Filed Under: Personal Stories
Speak Your Mind