Share review of Danetre Hospital

Danetre Hospital 2022-12-21 Person 3 5 0

I have received very good care from one member of staff who has been very supportive and helpful to me. However, sorting out my treatment has not been so easy and I am still waiting after 3 months for a certain treatment to be started which has been extremely frustrating because I know that treatment should help me a great deal.

I am being discharged from the service but I have not felt involved in that decision or that I have had any choice in that decision being made. They constantly talk about Patient Centred Care but then the team make those decisions without any involvement from the patient. I was not consulted about whether I felt okay about being discharged from the service (I am not happy and neither is my husband /full time carer), I have had poor mental health for the past few months and had some crises but the decision to discharge is still inevitable. It feels very pressured to get people discharged from the service even when they use minimal services. I do not have a CPN or regular support worker, only a support worker when required through crises, which is fine but why the need to discharge me when I use the service minimally anyway? I also had a relapse recently and I felt very at risk during that time. I asked several times to see my consultant but did not get to see him until 2 months after the crises had passed. It feels safer for me, having had a very long history of severe mental illness, to be kept in the service and to be able to use it when needed. I feel very insecure about being discharged from the service altogether despite being on long term antipsychotic medication, and I do not have much faith that it will be easy to be referred back to the service if and when needed (which is inevitable given my long history of severe mental illness). Going from previous experience, I was discharged once from the service many years ago and then needed the service again. I was refused more than once to be taken back on again and because no help was available in secondary care, I ended up having a long admission to hospital because I couldn't get the support when I needed it. I also lost my CPN a few years ago and was not consulted about this decision, just told one day that she was no longer going to be visiting me after years of support. Despite my objections and my carer's objections, we do not feel like we were listened to at all and had no involvement in that decision. I do not feel like anything has changed because once again, this big decision to discharge me from the service has been taken and I have been informed of this decision, but have had no say in this decision and neither has my carer. Neither of us are happy about it as going from past history I am likely to need services again, but I do not feel at all confident that I will be able to access them in the future. It always feels in the past few years that ways to get a patient out of the service and providing the least amount of care necessary (although the patient may feel they need more support as I did when my CPN was withdrawn without notice, preparation or a plan) is the way the service operates now and that does not feel like a good way to support or care for patients. There always feels this pressure to be pushed out of the service even when using minimal services, and it is not the way a service should be run in my opinion because that does not feel in the best interest of the patient.