to expect to be given more than an hour's notice of ....

Thank you all for your support again - you are lovely.

We've made progress - it's not Wednesday!

As absent implies, there seems to be an expectation that, if you don't do fit in to suit the unit, you don't care! This is after waiting a fortnight for the final go ahead for Mum's discharge to be finalised and the fact that it was impressed on me that her room should be ready with her bits and pieces and one of us should be there to help her settle in or she runs the risk if having another stay in the unit .

There doesn't seem to be any acceptance of the reality that my brothers work and can't take time of at the drop of a hat or the fact that today, I'm on granny duty and yesterday it was the East Midlands meetup!

In the case of my aunt, I was then a volunteer Home Visitor with Age Concern and the other relative involved was a Consultant in an NHS hospital (elsewhere) and with all our expertise we could not stop a premature discharge and gross negligence by Social Services, who refused to do a one-off home assessment visit because it was too far from their offices (25 miles, I was making a round journey of at least 40 miles once a day and sometimes twice to look after my relations) and they wouldn't visit my aunt in hospital because the hospital that everybody in her area was sent to was half a mile over the county boundary.

The compulsory pre-discharge assessment was a paper and telephone job. When I told Social Services that my aunt's bedroom was up a steep staircase they rang the hospital and with a nurse each side to virtually carry her, they managed to get her up one flight of wide shallow hospital stairs so Social Services said she could climb stairs and the (one) carer would help her up them into bed.

I could go on with all the events leading to the final traumatic move into care but I won't. I have told this story before and could end up repeating myself too often like ***.

But Kitty a number of us have had similar experiences and really understand how difficult and exhausting and stressful these situations are - and how unnecessary.

It sounds as if district nurses (do we still have them?) and hospital staff need to communicate better. The experiences you both describe are disgraceful.

Bags In answer to your question, my elderly mother, still wearing a hospital gown and nothing else, was put into an ambulance (one of those ones used for outpatients) and delivered to my front door. I hadn't been told that she was going to be discharged that morning. She was travel sick en route and very distressed because she "felt like a parcel".

I think there is an assumption among many NHS staff that the sons and daughters of elderly people are always trying to weasel out of their care responsibilities once they have managed to offload their old person in some way. No doubt this is true in some cases but it is very upsetting and infuriating if this is not the case in one's own life.

When my aunt was discharged from hospital, they gave me a weekends warning of the day but 'forgot' to ring me on the day to give me the time. When I rang the hospital just before lunch to check on the discharge time as I hadn't heard from them I discovered she had been discharged first thing in the morning and the ambulance had delivered her home, placed her in a chair and gone. She had had a stroke and couldn't get out of the chair unaided and she had been given no equipment, no walking frame, no raised feet for her chair or anything to assist her. The carers were not due to make their first visit until 8.30 that evening.

Until I turned up around 2.00pm and managed to get loan equipment from the Red Cross and care for her she was there, immobile, unable to access the toilet, unfed, nothing to drink, being 'looked after' by a physically disabled husband with dementia.

What happens if it can't be arranged immediately by relatives? What if there's no handy relative with a car, for instance?

*granjura, you have to consider that possibility of course, but in my experience of elderly relatives in hospital the key staff take weeks to agree that they can be moved and once agreed, it has to be arranged immediately.

It could be (possibly) that they urgently needed her room for another person who had to be admitted quickly???

Really sorry, Kitty. I hope your Mum settles down well and that you'll be happy about it when you've had time to recover. I can't understand why it all has to be done in such a rush but I agree with the others, it shows a total lack of understanding of everyone's circumstances.

Kitty I heard just a little of a programme about care homes this morning and it seemed to me this lack of understanding for the relatives is rife.

Arrghh Kitty - I feel for you. Hope this Home will be the right one for mum and that you will be able to relax a bit when she is settled. By pm, which one is she going to? Take care

That's ridiculous! What are they thinking!?

It's infuriating, kitty. There is rarely any consideration for relatives and we're right down the bottom of the pile when it comes to decision making.

Yes, moan away kitty and no, of course you aren't being unreasonable!

kitty at least once this is sorted you'll (hopefully) be able to relax a little.
We are still happy for you to moan at us

Oh kitty! Just what you needed, eh? I know you'll cope, and get it all done, but it would have been nice to have been prepared. ((hugs))