Saturday

A hard day slaving over a hot keyboard for Lesley today. She’d been reading the NHS guidelines on what they call The Pathway for end of life care. It had been a huge effort as it’s a couple of hundred pages long. It certainly seemed to have been more effort than any of her dad’s palliative care teams had been prepared to put in because over the course of Dad’s final couple of months various members of the team had given a number of different accounts of what they would do which all contradicted each other and all failed to meet the rules that the NHS says must be followed.

At one point, soon after Lesley had had first sight of the Pathway guidelines, a palliative care nurse had attended Dad in The Home while Lesley was with him. The nurse had made some sort of pronouncement on something which Lesley already knew to be wrong.

“That’s not right! Look, I’ve got my laptop here. I’ll show you…”

In spite of the clear NHS branding and the NHS URL on the web page the nurse had refused to budge.

“That’s not what I’ve been told!”

The palliative care nurses’ job is to implement the Pathway guidelines. The guidelines should have been the source of their every action. None of the people Lesley met or spoke to seemed to know anything about them.

So not only were the palliative care nurses never available when needed, they were getting in the way of The Home’s in-house nurses and giving instructions that conflicted with each other and conflicted with the Pathway guidelines. The result of this was that Dad would lie in agony for hours on end and would be denied the funding for care he was entitled to.

I think there’ll be a letter.

Author’s Note

My Mum was in a nursing home in the Thames Valley for a year and a half until she passed away in December 2024. My Father-in-law went into the same home the following January. But Lesley’s sister didn’t approve and made the situation so awkward that he had to be moved. He passed away in March 2025. Names and locations have been changed or hidden to protect the identities of those involved.

Image Credit

Original Image by Nick Gilmore. April 2025.