14 June - In praise of NHS Services. Shame about London Ambulance Service. Is it always so bad?
With any luck I am done with hospitals for the foreseeable
future and the excuses for neglecting Bonkers largely disappears - except that
there is not much of the usual Council fare going on at present. Just the usual
unending Bexley Council inflicted road blockages and occasional political idiocy. There may be even
more waffle here than usual!
I must place on record that the much maligned NHS have done a brilliant job for
me over the past six months or so; firstly at Queen Elizabeth, Woolwich, then at St. Thomas
and finally a referral to specialists in Hertfordshire and a private
hospital nearby. Nine scans in eight months is not bad going! Five within 24
hours of each other! There was no viable alternative and strictly speaking I was a
bit over the usual age limit but Dr. V. from Guy’s (and Q.E.H. on Mondays) made the case
for me for which I will always be grateful.
It was either Hertfordshire or Liverpool - no one else in England offers suitable
treatment - and Hertfordshire can only tackle three or at most four patients a
week - so I felt rather privileged to be accepted there.
I saw how the NHS relies on overseas staff. Algerian, Romanian, Polish, Ivory
Coast, Kenyan, Pakistani and Italian were all in evidence and there were more I
didn’t get to speak to. Every last one of them was brilliant - well an English nurse
over-ruled the Pole and thereby put me through four hours of pain because rules
are rules - but we won’t go into that.
Now I am in recovery mode feeling more than a little dazed and confined to
barracks for several weeks to come. No more than three I hope.
The only let down was London Ambulance Service which insisted that a DA17
address meant I was the responsibility of Kent Ambulance. When that nonsense
fell flat they said (according to the people in Hertfordshire) that LAS only
collected people who had been delivered by ambulance. As if someone like me who
got himself into hospital by train was by definition fit enough to come back the same way after treatment.
In the end I came back via Dartford bridge in a minibus which will be lucky not
to get a speeding ticket. (And only then because LAS had delivered a Lewisham
patient to Hertfordshire and she qualified for the return trip and a diversion
to Belvedere was just about acceptable.)
For the record, my daughter, who is employed for her ability to dig out rules
and regulations, sent me the following which may be useful to someone somewhere.
Meanwhile, watch out for more mindless waffling as I watch disturbing news
unfold.
Options to resolve discharge problems…
1. Appeal to the hospital discharge coordinator
• Every hospital, has a Discharge Liaison / Patient Transport Manager.
• They can override transport blocks by arranging:
o Non-Emergency Patient Transport Service (NEPTS) with an appropriate
provider;
o Or in some cases, London Ambulance Service can be booked under a
borderline address exception with senior authorisation.
2. Escalate inside the hospital
• The hospital is responsible for ensuring safe discharge. It is not
acceptable to insist on ambulance-only discharge and then fail to provide it.
• If the transport team cannot resolve the issue, the patient or family
should contact Patient Advice and Liaison Service (PALS) to escalate formally.
3. Escalate to London Ambulance Service
• LAS has an out-of-area discharge policy for cases where patients treated
in London live just outside Greater London.
• The hospital transport coordinator can submit a formal exception request to LAS.
• LAS PALS can also be contacted directly:
Tel: 020 3069 0240
https://www.londonambulance.nhs.uk/contact-us/patient-advice-and-liaison-service-pals/
4. Engage the relevant county NEPTS provider
• If the address technically falls under a neighbouring county (e.g. Kent),
that county’s NEPTS provider may be responsible — though there are sometimes
disputes about “repatriation from London”.
• In this case:
o East of England Ambulance Service NEPTS (my hospital’s area ): Tel: 0345 605 1208
https://www.eastamb.nhs.uk
o G4S NEPTS (for Kent & Medway patients): Tel: 0800 096 0211
https://www.kmpt.nhs.uk/get-involved/patient-transport/
• The hospital transport team should liaise with the relevant provider and coordinate the booking.
5. Request alternative funded transport
• If none of the above options succeed, the hospital still has a legal duty of safe discharge.
• The hospital can fund a private ambulance or an appropriately adapted taxi
in exceptional cases — this is common when NHS boundary issues block standard options.
This is not the first time I have found London Ambulance Service to be extraordinarily poor.
In 2010 they
made me crawl on all fours through fifty feet of snow because
they refused to stretcher me to the ambulance and after complaint insisted
my drive is only six feet long so it didn’t really matter. How can people
tell such easily disproved lies and expect to get away with it? (But they
did.) They can’t
all be part of Starmer’s Government.