discharging NHS responsibilty

A recent support suggests that there is a national problem with discharging patients from hospital. Apparently GPs are not getting enough information when patients are going home. And why might this be? There’s not been a study into it yet but I think that it’s the usual suspects : lack of staff time, high turnover in wards and inexperienced junior medical staff. The NHS machine is constantly being run at maximum so it’s inevitable that communication will at times suffer. There’s also an issue with clerical support. If the discharge report goes into the usual pile of medical secretarial work then it might take weeks to be done. Perhaps we should also be asking what staff are doing when it comes for a patient to go home. There’s a near iconic status given to a patient’s ability to do stairs and also all those nice little things that occupational therapists look at like dressing practice but it might be time to overhaul the discharge process and ask if it’s time for it to be brought up to date with the 21st century.