My wife has a long term illness, and is on a weekly home therapy. The idea of the treatment is to avoid the ‘old’ way of doing things, requiring a fortnightly hospital visit to receive the treatment.
Being in the highlands, getting to hospital is a 140 mile round trip.
Of the last few months, the consultants/hospital are increasingly disorganised with appointments. My wife has been asked to go down this month to give blood samples, a week later for haematology to get results of last bloods before Christmas, and the week after again for immunology. They also ask her to collect her meds from a GP’s that is 31 miles away on a 6 week basis, rather than our local GP’s. Each trip is a day off work (unpaid).
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Can she:
request giving bloods at our local GP surgery, 400m from our house.
request that the consultants phone her with results.
insist on appointments all in the same day.
request that the meds come to our GP, not the last GP in their health authority.
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I thought you could ‘choose’ care on the NHS, it seems the doc’s are more concerned with her setting foot in the hospital (and not for treatment!)

It sounds like the doctors / managers are far more interested in organising services for their own convenience than that of their patients. I’d speak to her consultant and make the above points to him / her and ask for advice on how to get the services to talk to each other.

I’m not familiar with how the NHS is regulated in Scotland, but it might also be worth tracking down a copy of a patient charter for the Trust / Health Board (or similar) to see if that sets out the service your wife can reasonably expect.

Why don’t you explain your situation and just ask. My recent experience has been the hospital staff will bend over backwards to help as they have the welfare of the patient as their priority

Edit English PCT

It sounds like a function of a big organisation; not talking to one another.

You need to find someone who can co-ordinate the whole silliness, that might be her GP, or a Practice Nurse, or a single consultant, or a Specialist nurse (if she has a condition that has such a thing).

I’d write or even better phone up the hospital where she has most contact, talk to the PALS service, and see if you can’t get some sense from them. Or approach the GP to see if he/she can’t make some sense of it.

Matt

We had nightmares when going through IVF. We had a 4-5 hour drive each way to the hospital in Aberdeen and a few balls-ups with appointments, including our local health centre (2 miles away) refusing to take blood from Davina for a test. Luckily our consultant managed to get us sorted at Inverness (2 hours) rather than back over to Aberdeen.

It was not made clear to us at the outset that we had a choice of treatment centre – Dundee, Glasgow or Edinburgh would have been closer for us and it was only when I started getting increasingly irate and forceful with the staff that things started to move along.

I guess my point is that you shouldn’t put up with your situation – talk to whoever is in overall charge of your case and ask them to sort it out. If they don’t, take it higher.

Good luck
TS

Why don’t you explain your situation and just ask. My recent experience has been the hospital staff will bend over backwards to help as they have the welfare of the patient as their priority

She has tried via the specialist hematology nurse, but seems to be deaf ears / a defence of that not all the consultants ‘hers’ to organise.

I think the GP may be the way – see if they can sort what they can do from surgery here and then ‘tell’ the consultants that is how it is going to be.

I think it’s important to stress that no-one sets out to make your life or your situation more complex or more difficult, it’s just the system has evolved to deal with the commonplace rather than the exception.

Try to build relationships with those in the service you are using; it will pay dividends in the long term.

Agreed – we don’t want a ‘fight’ or get stroppy.
And I think we can see that ‘joined up’ thinking is not going to happen.
The NHS is amazing as far as treatment goes – it costs £1500 a month for meds alone….!
BUT I think we can choose some more than is being suggested.

Matt – we found it was our consultant that we had to manage to pull everything together, may of course be different in your case. I’m sure someone will help though if it’s put across in the right way often enough 🙂

TS

Hi Matt,

Some of it can certainly be better organised I would have thought, especially taking bloods locally as the labs used by gp are probably a central one where consultants could access results. Also might be worth asking Gp to liaise with specialista regarding results if are regular bloods and just go for ‘special’ appointments? – maybe useful if consultants not keen to phone results direct?

With regards to different specialities clinic, I know is pain but they probably hold them weeks apart, so trying to get them to hold one off/ be available for one patient who sees both is going to be hard to sort – especially if hold clinics in different hospitals as is case a lot up north.

Also would think getting meds should be doable, especially using some of the bigger chemists who do the script collections from dr’s. I’ve worked somewhere that scanned scripts direct to chemists and then posted paper copy to them after, worth asking if thats an option?

hopefully of some help,
Niall