Dear LPG,

I want to make a case for the people in our hospitals and particularly the older members of that club.    Hospital in-patients all have one thing in common; they are ill and often not in a position to make a complaint that counts, themselves. 

I visited a close family member at the hospital recently who asked me to alert a nurse to help him use the toilet.  He does have a degree of dementia but he is not incontinent and I watched him wait for 20 minutes before the nursing staff were able to deal with his situation, during which time the inevitable happened.   On that occasion the nurses apologised and told me that they were short-staffed by three workers in a ward where there was already only an allocation of one nurse to ten patients.

At the moment I make regular visits because of that family member and I have observed that at meal times the nurses become dinner ladies making it an inconvenient time for any patient to need any other help, and the record-keeping and paperwork that has to be done is important, but often appears to leave them with insufficient time to work with the patients.   

I wonder if anyone remembers, March 2010, when the news included the fact that nurses were accused, along with doctors, of not exercising an acceptable bedside manner (►►►).  I remember one suggested government solution being that refresher courses should be set up, but such suggestions just detract from the real issue here.

Surely the problem is that there are not enough of them.  We know that the nursing profession is suffering from a serious lack of new recruits while there are also many reports of the many established nurses who are looking to leave the profession in spite of the lack of job opportunities in the UK.  Visitors do not have to look very closely to see the stressful conditions that they work under, and I believe that they do a really good job, but there are not enough of them.   

We are obliged to pay national insurance, are the government not obliged to ensure that our National Health Service works adequately?

The only way that things will ever change is if we change them, so please take the time to complain. Because of their illnesses the friends and close family members that visit older patients are more likely to see the imperfections which nearly all stem from the fact that there are insufficient staff members in our hospital wards to do the job.

We are still fortunate that after all that happened in 2013 we still have Lewisham hospital, but we deserve the service that we were promised in the 1950s when Aneurin Bevan (►►►) brought about the NHS and all workers were made to pay national insurance, and promised a good health service for all, and not the ‘watered down’ version that we now have and still pay for.  The Government do not tolerate our inability to pay then why do we have to tolerate their inability to provide us with the high standard of service that we paid for?

We need to complain about all the examples of the results of understaffing that we observe on behalf of the people we visit, because the government cannot ignore the people it serves indefinitely, and those complaints might improve the lot of the existing and overstretched nurses that need our acknowledgement and help!

BE, Croydon

LPG did a little research and found that the place to start such a complaint is PALs

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… and here is some other related information

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