Patient Transport - Moonlight Flit to Addenbrooke's

I fear all is still not well with a business in East Anglia that is, it would seem, no more complex than a taxi service. NHS Patients are suffering as a result.

Viv was still in The Lister Hospital, Stevenage yesterday, with a view to being transferred to Addenbrooke's for neurosurgical treatment.

At 4.50 Addenbrooke's phoned The Lister saying a bed was available for her. The Lister ward staff asked me to help get Viv ready for transport which could arrive at any time. We got her dressed and into her wheelchair, everything was packed up and ready to go by 5.30.

The transport didn't arrive until 11.30. It was 1.30 by the time Viv was settled in her bed at Addenbrooke's. Staff at the Lister had been phoning the transport control in Norwich or Chelmsford (not exactly local to Hertfordshire!) every hour, each time being told that transport would be with them soon - half an hour, or 'within the hour'. I called as well at about 8.30, and was told that the absolute worst-case was 10pm.

The phone lines for transport control went unanswered after 10pm. We had no way of knowing whether the ambulance was on it's way, or how long it would be. 

I did mention the delay to the ambulance men when they arrived and they said that they are given ridiculous times for journeys by their controllers - 20 minutes for Stevenage to Cambridge, for instance. They also said that there hadn't been anything unusual happening earlier in the day, they did not understand why control hadn't despatched a crew for this job much earlier in the evening. Few minicab firms that are that badly organised would be in business for long!

The ward staff at The Lister told me that this experience is far from unusual.

It isn't good for sick patients to be travelling around the country in the middle of the night - they need their sleep! It would seem that whoever is running the Patient Transport Service (which is distinct from the ambulance service) has no basic understanding of the needs of sick people or of distances and travel times between NHS locations in our region (even though these are readily available on, for instance, Google Maps)!

I accept that delays happen, but it would have been better for the controllers to tell the Lister ward staff from the outset that transport would not be with them until much later - that way, we could have got Viv resting, rather than all dressed up and ready to go. To me it seemed that the controllers hadn't a clue.

This isn't a case where more money is needed, just better organisation - travel times between hospitals must surely be fairly standard!

Why isn't patient transport better managed - why can't they just use the techniques that taxi and courier companies use ? Yet again, something has been 'reorganised' without the poor bloody patient being considered!