Adrian Chiles’s experience (What I learned from a freezing night in A&E with my dad, 31 January) is sadly the norm. Working as a pharmacist in a GP surgery, and also having had a close family member suffer a stroke last year, I see this from both sides and completely agree with him that the problems start following discharge.
Despite all the chaos that ensues during an emergency visit to hospital, the system does work and patients do get sorted, albeit slowly. The problem lies with the disconnected IT systems between the hospital and GP, or even between different hospitals, and the lack of patients’ understanding of this. It’s not unreasonable to assume that all your relevant information has landed neatly into your doctor’s inbox, and that someone will call or visit. Sadly, this is often not the case – discharge summaries from hospital can be late or incomplete, and sometimes don’t turn up at all. Some are still handwritten.
Important information such as scans or blood test results are not accessible if the hospital that the patient visited is in a different area. This often means expensive tests are repeated unnecessarily. I often speak to patients who have had delayed followups, or not had their medications updated because they expected someone to contact them.
Liz Brooke
Bewdley, Worcestershire
• I’m with Adrian Chiles – why doesn’t the NHS use emails? My sister received two letters from the hospital on the same day, one giving her an appointment (two weeks earlier) and the other asking why she hadn’t attended it. A friend was discharged from hospital after a hysterectomy and prescribed morphine, but the district nurses would not give it as they’d not been notified. Both problems would have been solved by using emails. I get texts from the NHS. Why not emails?
Judith French
Lichfield, Staffordshire
