I really, really wish people wouldn’t:
leave their relatives with dementia or any kind of chronic or acute confusion in A&E alone. We need to know what is normal for them; some people are confused as their ‘normal’, for others it is something entirely new. If we have no idea, we’ll have to assume it’s new, and your relative may even end up with inappropriate investigaitons or treatments because we had to play it safe. Not to mention that being in A&E is scary for them; please be there for your relative, don’t leave them to deal with being sick in a strange place all alone. It’s not fair to the patient or their clinicians.
leave their relatives who cannot speak English in A&E alone. Again, if they can’t understand, then it’s a scary situation for them. And we also find it hard to communicate with them or take a history. We can get a hold of translational facilities, but it takes valuable time that might affect their care.
Send in care home residents like the above with a care worker who does NOT know anything about how that resident has been doing the past few days. It’s not very helpful. We NEED to ask questions about whether someone’s been going to the toilet, eating, coughing, in pain, etc. and any carer coming with them to hospital should know this kind of basic information.
Bring in their kid, if they are the parent who has been at work all day/week and has no idea of how the kid as actually been doing at home. Again, things like eating, drinking, peeing, pooing, coughing, fevers, reporting pain, whether they are their usual self, are all standard information we expect a parent to be able to tell us. If you’re not the parent who’s been looking afterh them, then I’ll have to call the other parent up on the phone and ask them these questions, so it’d really help if you knew what was going on.
I’m serious, I furnish my vet with more information about how the cats are doing, than I get from most of the above. Some nights in A&E, I have to see confused patient after confused patient, frequently left in A&E without anyone who knows what is normal for them. It makes working out what is going on a lot harder.
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