Woman missed final goodbye with dying mother in hospital
BBCHealth trust bosses say they learned vital lessons after staff failed to notify the daughter of a dying woman in time for her to say goodbye.
University Hospitals Bristol & Weston Trust (UHBW) was told by a health ombudsman it needed to introduce a plan to keep relatives better informed.
The complaint was one of four partly upheld against UHBW since April 2020.
A report to the trust's board detailing the complaints aimed to show how things had been put right since.
While the Parliamentary & Health Service Ombudsman (PHSO) did not find any failings with the end-of-life patient's care or treatment, it concluded "staff failed to notify the patient's daughter early enough for her to say goodbye and be with her mother when she passed away".
The PHSO told the trust to write to the complainant to acknowledge staff should have contacted the family sooner when the woman's condition changed, and said the trust should produce an action plan confirming how it would ensure relatives were kept better informed.
The UHBW report said: "A safety brief was produced in respect of timely contact of patients' relatives.
"In addition, staff were instructed to speak to patients and their families about the patient's wishes, including who should be contacted in an emergency, and for this to be recorded in the patients' notes."
Getty ImagesIn another case, UHBW had to apologise and make improvements to keep operating theatres available, after it failed twice to plan a patient's surgery on time and then did not follow them up as an outpatient properly.
It also paid £500 compensation to a woman for distress caused when a midwife wrongly told an ambulance crew she could make her own way to hospital, which led to the introduction of a new dedicated telephone triage system.
The fourth complaint involved factual errors and inconsistencies in the trust's response to a complaint from a patient. The ombudsman told the organisation to pay her £300.
The report to the board said all four cases were from 2020/21 and not a single complaint had been upheld or partly upheld in the two years since then.
It said: "The percentage of cases upheld or partly upheld is lower for UHBW than for comparable acute trusts nationally."
The report said the PHSO had carried out preliminary or detailed inquiries into 26 complaints against UHBW since April 2020.
None had been upheld in full, four were partly upheld, one was not upheld and 16 were closed with no further action.
One was settled before a full investigation with a £100 goodwill payment agreed by the trust and complainant and the remaining four cases, all from 2022/23, are pending an outcome.
