Just a short post tonight as its been a long busy day….

We see a lot of dead people in our job.  In the last 5 shifts I have seen three dead people, two of which there was absolutely nothing that we could do for them.  For these people we complete a Recognition of Life Extinct procedure and contact the relevant people to allow the family to grieve.

We do these jobs frequently, but whilst its very sad for the family we often see these as just another job.  However today was slightly different…

We were called to a female in her 80’s who was living in sheltered accommodation who had been found deceased.  When we arrived it was explained that the lady had not been seen for over 10 hours and had recently been discharged from hospital.

When we saw the patient we just knew that the patient was dead – its a strange feeling as we “just know”.  Obviously we cant just go on our feelings to have to check for cardiac or respiratory effort, complete and ECG and also look for other signs such as rigor mortis – these tests all confirmed our suspicions.

Next we have to complete our paperwork and to achieve this we have to be “detectives” looking for clues about the patient.

The first thing that we found was a discharge letter from the hospital which stated that she was safe to be sent home with a new care package….

We have now found out the the new care package included regular night time checks, which appear to have not happened.

The final sad thing about this story, and the bit that made it stick in my mind, was the fact that we found the “phone off of the hook” with the receiver near to the patients chair.  Also near the patient was a note which said “Please Help Me”….

We can only assume that the patient has recently been discharged from the hospital following a chest infection.  The hospital saw it necessary to send her home early and could justify this by implementing a new care package.  The new care package was designed to check on the patient regularly, must the same as a nurse might on a ward.  It appears that the patient may not have had regular night time checks which she desperately needed due to the fact that she has become so short of breath, probably due to the same illness that she went to hospital with, which stopped her from being able to talk on the phone, but she was still aware of her need for help, so much so that she managed to scribble a note asking for help, withe the words HELP ME being scribbled over a number of times to make it more prominent…..