10 Comments

Thank you for sharing my father's story. Patients and families from all communities have to be vocal on their experiences if anything is to change in the NHS.

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Outstanding commentary and the only way that the NHS will ever change

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Using private services an the NHS isn’t as simple as it looks. Firstly front line staff (of whom we have major shortages) spend time writing tenders for their own jobs (all of this taking them away from their core job) then private providers tend to cherry pick the easy jobs, making a profit on them, leaving the tricky expensive stuff to an underfunded NHS.

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So very true. Had a similar experience to ‘Andrew’ with my late father when he broke his hip.

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The failure of the NHS to communicate with patients & family is extremely upsetting. My mother 94 recently had a fall & broke her shoulder - she is fortunate in that she has an alarm system & I installed a camera - so she was in hospital promptly. The care overall was fine but the communication awful. It seems A&E information isn't linked to ward information leading to repetition & worse, the patient not receiving the care they need. I'm a retired teacher, I'm very confident & persistent & eventually things sorted themselves out but not without the duty manager where my mum mum lives, helping us traverse the care system. Goodness knows what happens to some patients. It was exhausting.

I hope your elbow has healed.

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AI will make nhs change. It has no choice.

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Also had a similar experience with my dad when he was admitted to hospital very distressing and move to care home was terrible communication

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I don’t know why you’re so worried about communication with patients. I’m sure all those NHS staff have had their gender awareness training.

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My anger and frustrations whilst reading this are not only derived from my own personal experiences but from knowing that there are simple technical solutions, free or low cost or easily sponsored (who wouldn’t want their logo shared across the NHS).

For one example, check out: https://Bob-E.ai. It is a trainable new generation ChatBot that only shares information you train in to it. Approximately 90% of our healthcare enquiries are routine. It’s no longer rocket science!

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In a much less distressing example, I recently saw my wonderful doctor about a symptom completely unrelated to the angina treatment I have very successfully had from him. At the end of the appointment, he asked how my consultation with the cardiologist went, as he had never received any results - it was about two years ago…….

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