Meeting up with Deputy Head of Patient Experience and Involvement at Kingston Hospital I was keen to share my thoughts about the patient experience and how we could make patients in A&E feel safer on arrival.
Patients arrive in Majors often by ambulance and before they can find their own cubicle they wait in the corridor. I know how anxious patients are when they arrive. They dont always know what's wrong with them. Sometimes they're in pain. Sometimes they are covered in blood. Sometimes they're traumatised. Sometimes they are depressed. Often they are frail and they've had a fall. Sometimes they have concussion or a migraine or maybe dementia and confusion.
It can be a long wait. They dont know how long they will have to wait. Sometimes they have to wait hours and hours.
It's not a restful place. The lights are bright. The doors open and close continually and in the winter it can be cold and the hospital blankets are cotton. There are paramedics, security staff, police, family, sometimes workmen, and other patients some with mental health emergency problems. Sometimes vulnerable and elderly patients feel scared of the mental health patients. So if our patients arrive in the night they will probably miss a night's restorative sleep in this stressful environment and their anxiety is heightened by an unfamiliar setting, fear and insecurity.
As a volunteer this is where we can help the patients most with reassurance and company and helping them to feel safe.
We can attend to their needs like helping them to go the loo, getting a cup of tea or drink and helping them to stay hydrated, finding food if they are hungry, lending them a phone or helping them to charge their phone, keeping them warm, finding a pillow, offering a chair to a loved one, finding out how much longer and what will happen next.
Kingston Hospital management are doing a lot to improve patient flow with faster triage and more cubicles have been created too.
Im asking management to look at other locations in A&E where arriving patients can rest like in the SDEC unit or X-ray suite. I'm asking whether we can separate elderly patients from mental health patients.
Im asking about mental health emergency patients and getting faster and round the clock mental health professionals to take over from the police with a safe space for them to go.
