Care Opinion

Communication with a patient at East Surrey hospital

Posted By Silence

"Communication with a patient at East Surrey hospital"

About: East Surrey Hospital

(as a relative),

My mother was admitted into ES Hospital last week. I live 3 hours journey from the hospital but have managed to visit most days ( 6 hours travel per day).

I bought her a mobile phone and put money on it only to discover that her Ward has no phone signal. I try to phone her every morning but rarely does anyone answer and they cannot bring a phone to her bed. There are no portable landline phones in this ward.

I feel this is a really significant shortcoming as the morale of patients directly impacts on their physical well being. Why cannot something be done about this?

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Responses

Response from Ian Mackenzie, Director of Information and Facilities, Surrey and Sussex Healthcare NHS Trust 12 years ago
Ian Mackenzie
Director of Information and Facilities,
Surrey and Sussex Healthcare NHS Trust

I am responsible for everything to do with facilities, estates and IT. This includes our £50m building programme, food, cleaning, estates, porters, telephones, IT, transport, car parks and anything similar. Also leading our new Patient Experience Programme.

Submitted on 02/07/2012 at 13:52
Published on Care Opinion at 14:54

picture of Ian Mackenzie

Thank you for your comment about telephoning patients whilst they are inpatients at East Surrey Hospital.

Having received this comment I went down and looked at a number of wards to check what was currently available. Some wards have handsets that can be passed to patients and some don’t.

I have therefore arranged for all wards to be upgraded to portable handsets; this will take a couple of weeks to arrange. I have however ascertained which ward this comment refers to and a portable handset is being put in that ward this afternoon.

I appreciate that it won’t affect your own situation but all new wards we open (such as Copthorne and Charlwood wards in February 2012) have individual patient phones – as part of an individual patient entertainment system - as we identified this as a service we wished our patients to have. We intend to roll this out across the hospital, but it will take some time to complete the whole site.

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Response from Ian Mackenzie, Director of Information and Facilities, Surrey and Sussex Healthcare NHS Trust 12 years ago
We have made a change
Ian Mackenzie
Director of Information and Facilities,
Surrey and Sussex Healthcare NHS Trust

I am responsible for everything to do with facilities, estates and IT. This includes our £50m building programme, food, cleaning, estates, porters, telephones, IT, transport, car parks and anything similar. Also leading our new Patient Experience Programme.

Submitted on 03/07/2012 at 12:15
Published on Care Opinion at 12:34

picture of Ian Mackenzie

As an update the phone is now on this ward and the other portable handsets are on order.

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