Dying to leave hospital
Susannah Hickling takes a look at the number of people who die within a month of discharge. Are we discharging people too quickly to free up beds for others?
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Please join us in welcoming Susannah Hickling to Somerset Confidential. Susannah contributed a number of articles to the old Leveller newspaper, but this is her first piece for Somerset Confidential. She specialises in healthcare issues and we hope to feature a lot more of her work in due course.
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Editors note/introduction: My interest in the figures for deaths following discharge is personal. On 16 November 2023 my father was admitted to Worcestershire Royal Hospital after a fall. He was weak (he was 97 so not exactly running around in the peak of fitness before his fall) and my expectation was that he would be in hospital until Christmas. Suddenly on 27 November he was discharged. I received a phonecall from the discharge team telling me I needed to come to the hospital to pick him up. I explained that I lived in Wiltshire and couldn’t get to Worcester quickly and that in any case he was, in my view (I’d seen him earlier in the week), far too frail to discharge.
The discharge team were not interested and said they’d be discharging him anyway. As a result he was dumped at his home later that day. Within 2 hours of arriving home he had a much more serious fall and paramedics were called to take him to hospital. As his bed in Worcester had now been taken, he was sent to Redditch before being shunted across the county to Malvern.
Eventually Worcester had to take him back as Malvern didn’t have the facilities to carry out the tests he needed. His condition continued to deteriorate and he passed away in hospital on 30 December.
It is my view, and the view of our family, that his death was a direct consequence of an inappropriate discharge and a lack of support from the hospital. But it made me wonder if he had been unlucky or was this part of a wider problem and was this a problem people experienced in Somerset?
It also made me realise that someone else, someone more neutral needed to write the article!
Dying to leave hospital
by Susannah Hickling
When you’re admitted to hospital, you expect to find out what’s wrong with you and to be discharged when you’re well enough to go home. This didn’t happen in the case of one 79-year-old man from Yeovil and the consequences were truly tragic.
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